Negotiating Urban Conflicts

Materialities | ed. by Gabriele Klein, Martina Löw and Michael Meuser | volume 1
Helmuth Berking, Sybille Frank, Lars Frers, Martina Löw,
Lars Meier, Silke Steets, Sergej Stoetzer (eds.)
Negotiating Urban Conflicts
Interaction, Space and Control
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C o n t en t s

Introduction: Negotiating Urban Conflicts 9

I Politics of Space:
The Modern, the Postmodern and the Postcolonial

Postcolonial Cities, Postcolonial Critiques 15

ANTHONY D. KING

Contested Places and the Politics of Space 29

HELMUTH BERKING

The City as Assemblage. Diasporic Cultures, Postmodern Spaces,

and Biopolitics 41
COUZE VENN

Remapping the Geopolitics of Terror:

Uncanny Urban Spaces in Singapore 53
LISA LAW

Cultural Homogenisation, Places of Memory, and the Loss

of Secular Urban Space 67
ANIL BHATTI
II Spatializing Identities

The Politics and Poetics of Religion:

Hindu Processions and Urban Conflicts 85
LILY KONG

Negotiating the City—Everyday Forms of Segregation

in Middle Class Cairo 99
ANOUK DE KONING

Negotiating Public Spaces: The Right to the Gendered City

and the Right to Difference 113
TOVI FENSTER

On the Road to Being White: The Construction of Whiteness

in the Everyday Life of Expatriate German High Flyers
in Singapore and London 125
LARS MEIER

Prostitution—Power Relations between Space and Gender 139

MARTINA LÖW/RENATE RUHNE

III Imageries of Cities

Between Refeudalization and New Cultural Politics:

The 300th Anniversary of St. Petersburg 155
ELENA TRUBINA

Reflections on a Cartography of the Non-Visible.

Urban Experience and the Internet 167
MARC RIES

Picturing Urban Identities 177

SERGEJ STOETZER

Communist Heritage Tourism and its Local (Dis)Contents

at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin 195
SYBILLE FRANK
Earthquake Recovery and Historic Buildings:
Investigating the Conflicts 209
FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

IV Exclusion, Security and Surveillance

The Phenomenon of Exclusion 227

HEINZ BUDE

Orbit Palace. Locations and Cultures of Redundant Time 235

SILKE STEETS

Pacification by Design:
An Ethnography of Normalization Techniques 247
LARS FRERS

Violence Prevention in a South African Township 261

KOSTA MATHÉY

Homeland/Target: Cities and the “War on Terror” 277

STEPHEN GRAHAM

Terrorism and the Right to the Secure City:

Safety vs. Security in Public Spaces 289
PETER MARCUSE

Authors 305
Introduction: Negotiating Ur ban Conflict s

If city life is understood as a complex composition of strangers among strang-

ers, difference, conflict, and compromise are not only—and inevitably—
defining features of this particular place. They are also, and have to be, car-
ried out in spatial terms based on and tied into a specific politics of space. It is
above all in cities that the spatial practices of social actors and institutions
—and thus highly divergent spatial politics—come up against one another.
Cities have always been arenas of social and symbolic conflict. As places
of gender, class, ethnicity, and the myriad variations of identity-related differ-
ences, one of the major roles they are predestined to play is that of a powerful
integrator; yet on the other hand urban contexts are, as it were, the ideal set-
ting for marginalization and violence. The struggle for control of urban spaces
is an ambivalent mode of sociation, one that cuts systematically across the
whole of everyday life: In and by producing themselves, groups produce ex-
clusive spaces and then, in turn, use the boundaries they have created to de-
fine themselves. In this way border control and politics of identity represent
two sides of one coin. The spatial politics subscribed to by social actors at the
same time shapes the contour of the city’s inner order and the symbolic uni-
verses of the groups living in it.
These manifold lines of potential conflict run up against institutional re-
gimes designed to guarantee urban security. What is paradox here are the ef-
fects engendered by attempts to ‘domesticate’ violence and the promise of
security they imply, for they themselves are based on spatial politics and thus
encourage the creation of new boundaries and renewed marginalization. Be it
addressed as location policy or logic of segregation, as ghettoization or gentri-
fication, invariably, it would appear, the underlying issue is the definition and
production, the stabilization and maintenance of spatial arrangements and the
way they are hierarchized.

9
NEGOTIATING URBAN CONFLICTS – POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

Class, ethnicity, and gender, indeed all categorial identities, not only mark
symbolic distances. They also unfold their distinctive (local) significance
more in connection with the realization of spatial divisions that refer the cate-
gorial sense of orientation to strictly delimited, territorialized entities. “That’s
the ghetto over there”; “back there is where the new money lives”; “this is a
safe part of town,” etc.
The struggle for territorial control, spatial arrangements, and order focuses
some of the motives—fundamental in nature though not always borne in mind
by social policy and social theory—apparent in all types of urban conflict.
Building on this premise, “Negotiating urban conflicts” centers on various
mutually disruptive and reinforcing spatial politics with a view to pinpointing
some of the major old and very new conflict potentials, but without losing
sight of the need to identify altered negotiating processes. To put the main
thread of this edition in a nutshell version means conceptualizing spatial poli-
tics from the perspective of a) actors, b) institutional regimes, c) constructions
of difference with the processes of compromise which they entail.
Since urban conflicts, demarcations, and claims to space are played out in
local contexts, though without being restricted by them in their scope, cultural
frames take on particular significance here. Given that options of collective
actors, configurations of institutional regimes, and possible compromises vary
in cultural terms, the central question is: How can those specific and distinc-
tive logics be grasped on which locality as a particular frame of knowledge,
meaning and practice is built? Urban-sociological research designs have al-
ways tended not only to play down the role of the local as a just context
driven site but to ‘Europeanize’ it as well. The background assumptions that
have today merged to form the ideal type of the “European city” systemati-
cally obstruct our view of other modes of urbanization, of processes involved
in staking out claims to and demarcating space(s) in Asia, Africa, eastern
Europe, and Latin America. It is for this reason that theoretical interventions,
in any case insufficiently grasped by the keyword “postcolonialism,” are of
particular interest in the present context. The latter have gone some way to-
ward de-centering the supposed center and calling to memory the powerful
geographies of colonization, linking the genesis of the urban centers of the
West with the violent construction of colonial space. It is precisely because
the discourse on the postcolonial city systematically thwarts any attempts to
construct a clear-cut geographic delineation of “the West and the rest” by pro-
viding the tools needed to narrate the (hi)story of urbanization not “from the
inside out” but from “the outside in” that this shift in perspective may be seen
as a necessary corrective to the Eurocentric urbanization discourse. After all,
what we have experienced since the end of the Second World War and the
period of decolonization—the palpable presence of people from other cultures
and continents in our midst—has for centuries been the usual case in the

10
 INTRODUCTION

world that is not Europe. Given this geohistorical backdrop, the assumption
that multiculturalism is neither a European invention nor deeply embedded in
its past is hard to deny.
“Postcolonialism” and “spatial politics” constitute the two discursive
frames of this edition. While the motives and motivations of postcolonialism
ensure that the geographic trajectories and the power-political configurations
of local cultures, stocks of knowledge, constructions of identity, etc. are reas-
sessed, the issue of spatial politics provides the thematic focus needed to
grasp cities, urban conflicts, etc. in terms of their own specific internal logic,
but without reducing them to what might be termed local specificity. This ap-
proach makes it possible to recognize distances and specify differences that, if
they do not radically alter our notion of urbanity and urbanization, at least go
some way toward enlarging it, laying the groundwork for us to re-explore
possibilities for social change as well as new political governance potentials.
This collection of essays is organized in four chapters. “Politics of Space”
(I) assembles contributions on postcolonialism, diasporic cultures, and diverse
processes of cultural homogenization with a main emphasis on theoretical
efforts of how to conceptualize spatial politics. “Spatializing Identities” (II)
presents case studies focusing mainly on the distinctive, territorialized signifi-
cance of both the production and ascription of categorical identities. “Image-
ries of Cities” (III) examines various modes of institutional and everyday-life-
related imagining and image engineering of the urban landscape. The final
chapter, “Exclusion, Surveillance and Security” (IV), deals with the multiplic-
ity of social effects strategies of spacing evoke and with the power in places.
Although, as the content as well as these sentences show, there is a certain
arrangement of topics at work here, this is by no means meant as an organiza-
tional structure for advancing a single and all-inclusive theoretical approach.
On the contrary: Situated in quite different geographical as well as theoretical
landscapes, this book offers insights into the ongoing and polyphonic debate
about the past, the present, and the future of the urban. Readers are invited to
various border crossings. You will encounter the views of geographers, an-
thropologists, and urban planners, of sociologists, media theorists, and politi-
cal scientists, and, of course, you are invited to make your own pathways
through these politics of space, which constitute the urban condition. “Cities,”
Kofi Annan has noted, “are the collective future of humankind.” But the fu-
ture of cities depends on the people inhabiting, and thereby creating and chan-
ging, them.

11
NEGOTIATING URBAN CONFLICTS – POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

Acknowledgments

This collection of essays came out of a three days conference of the same title
held at the Darmstadt University of Technology on April 7-9, 2005, spon-
sored by the British Council, the Carlo und Karin Giersch Foundation at
Darmstadt University of Technology, the City of Science, Darmstadt, the
Darmstadt University of Technology, the Embassy of the United States of
America, the Heinrich Böll Foundation Israel, the MAB Projektentwicklung
GmbH, the Post-Graduate College ‘Technology and Society’, the TZ Rhein-
Main, and the Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag.
We want to thank all organizations and the persons whose generosity and
commitment made this event possible. Our special thanks go to Professor Dr.
Ing. Johann-Dietrich Wörner, President of the Darmstadt University of Tech-
nology. Special thanks go also to Prof. Dr. Ingrid Breckner, Prof. Dr. Bruno
Arich-Gerz, and Prof. Dr. Hermann Schwengel who chaired and intellectually
structured various sessions. We are deeply indebted to Heike Kollross and
Meherangis Bürkle, who always kept a level head in the office. Caroline Frit-
sche, Andrea Gromer, Richard Händel, Regine Henn, Jochen Schwenk, Isa-
belle Speich, and Gunter Weidenhaus, our student staff, not only solved all
kinds of problems but also set the stage for an ambience of hospitality and
relaxation.

The Editors Darmstadt, March 2006

12
 I. POLITICS OF SPACE:
THE MODERN, THE POSTMODERN
AND THE POSTCOLONIAL
Post co lonia l C it ie s, Post col onial C rit iqu es

ANTHONY D. KING

The chapter discusses recent postcolonial writing on cities outside and inside
Europe, both in relation to revisionary interpretations of “the colonial city”
and on the concept (and reality) of the contemporary postcolonial city itself.1

Introduction

The organizers of the conference on which this collection is based acknowl-

edged two basic postcolonial premises. They refer to “the powerful geogra-
phies of colonization” linking the development of urban centers in the West
with the genesis of colonial space, connecting this to “the palpable presence
of people from other cultures and continents in our midst.” This, “for centu-
ries, has been the normal case in the world that is not Europe.” Revising this
paper six months after the conference, following “terrorist” bombings in Lon-
don, the earthquake in South Asia, riots in French cities, and the continuing
war in Iraq, it is apparent that the “postcolonial presence” assumes daily a
new significance, the subtext of this paper.
In accepting these two premises, however, my aim in this essay is to dis-
cuss recent postcolonial writing on cities both outside and inside Europe. I
first briefly address recent writing on the topic of colonial cities by postcolo-
nial authors indigenous to those cities. I then address recent scholarship on the
postcolonial city, understood, as it is, in different ways, and the cross-over
between notions of the postimperial, postcolonial, and global city. While all
these categories are inter-related, the obvious distinction between them is the
political and historical framework within which each is conceived and repre-

1 Parts of this paper appeared in Soziale Welt 16, 2005: 67-85.

15
ANTHONY D. KING

sented. The central issue concerns the question of representation, especially

the power of representation to affect both the understanding of the city as well
as policies adopted towards it.
Most urbanists would probably agree that the most influential representa-
tion of the city in recent years has been that of the “world” or “global city.”
Yet while the criteria for identifying “world cities” are clearly stated (Beaver-
stock et al. 1999; Keil/Brenner 2006), they are not particularly useful for ad-
dressing issues of global or local security posed by religious or other ideo-
logically driven groups, or for policies of education or language conceived in
relation to specific cultural histories and contemporary political identities.
While acknowledging that “world city” populations are racially and ethnically
diverse and frequently characterized by social and spatial polarization, the
“world city” model ignores the religio-cultural origins of the city’s popula-
tions and the geopolitico-historical conditions explaining their presence.
While the concept of “postcolonial” would, in many cases, be analytically
more useful, this is not its most important use. However, it does serve to illus-
trate that any city’s “reality” is inseparable from its representation.
Until the early l980s, “post colonial” simply meant “after the colonial”
and referred to peoples, states, and societies that had experienced a formal
decolonization process. Subsequently, “postcolonial” has come to mean “an
attitude of critical engagement with colonialism’s after effects and its con-
structions of knowledge” (Radcliffe 1997: 1331). Postcolonialism is “a criti-
cal politico-intellectual formation […] centrally concerned with the impact of
colonialism and its contestation on the cultures of both colonizing and colo-
nized peoples in the past, and the reproduction and transformation of colonial
relations, representations and practices in the present” (Gregory 2000: 612).
Postcolonial criticism also assumes a knowledge of colonial histories in
the contemporary world, not only of major European imperial powers but also
of the USA, Russia, and Japan. By the early twentieth century, Europe held a
grand total of 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies,
dominions, and commonwealths (Said 1993: 14). At the heart of much post-
colonial critique is an assumption succinctly expressed in the title of Chakra-
barty’s book, Provincializing Europe (2000). In addressing the topic of post-
colonial cities, therefore, both usages—a period following colonization and a
critical conceptual position—need deploying.

Ci t i e s : C o l o n i a l a n d p o s t c o l o n i a l

Not only are the ‘colonial city’ and the ‘imperial city’ umbilically connected in terms of
economic linkages as well as cultural hybridization, but their ‘post-equivalents’ cannot be
disentangled one from the other and need to be analyzed within a single ‘postcolonial’
framework of intertwining histories and relations (Yeoh 2001: 457).

16
 POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

As Yeoh suggests, to write about the postcolonial city presupposes some

minimum knowledge of its predecessor, the colonial city, including its histo-
riography.2 Though embracing, for geographers, “a variety of urban types and
forms,” it may nonetheless be generalized as “a distinct settlement form re-
sulting from the domination of an indigenous civilization by colonial settlers”
(Pacione 2001: 450–1), the focus here being on the colonial city established
by Europeans mainly in the 19th and early 20th century in Asia and Africa.
Important here, and bringing the second meaning of “postcolonial” into
play, we need to recognize that both the concept of, and most of the literature
on, the colonial city comes from Euro-American scholars (principally English
and American, some French and Spanish), and is written in these languages.
Not only is the colonial city apparently a colonial product, so also is its
representation.
Ethnic origin, geographical location, or political position alone should not,
of course, be treated as an essentialism giving indigenous inhabitants of the
one-time colonial city a privileged insight into its characteristics.3 It is rather
that these mainly “non-indigenous” studies—which might be described as the
first critical “postcolonial” accounts of colonial cities, produced in the three or
four decades following independence—locate the topic, understandably per-
haps, within a European or Euro-American frame. As Indonesian scholar
Abidin Kusno has written about these various studies of colonial urbanism
(e.g. King 1976; Rabinow 1989; Metcalf 1989; Wright 1991 etc.), “to what
extent have studies centered on European imperialism themselves ‘colonized’
ways of thinking about colonial and postcolonial space?” (2000: 6).
Similar views can be found in Urbanism: Imported or Exported: Native
Aspirations and Foreign Plans (2003), where the editors refer to “a sense of
unease” among young researchers regarding the “content, methods and tone”
of much recent literature on the formation of modern cities, particularly in
“developing countries,” a feeling that “it often did not adequately convey the
complexity of power relations and flows. In particular, the local elements are
under-represented […] and where they are present they are often dealt with as
recipients of actions rather than as actors […] a significant part of the litera-

2 Cf. King (1985) and (1989).

3 While the location of an author is less important than the position from which
she or he speaks—epistemologically, politically, culturally—it is statistically
more likely that authors from (or with connections to) the one-time colonized so-
ciety are not only fluent in the colonial as well as the national language, but pos-
sibly also in local and regional languages of the once colonized state. They may
also have better knowledge of local sources. Given the contemporary movement
of scholars between locations worldwide, where they work or write up their re-
search is of less importance. Valid contributions can be made by anyone (cf.
King 2003: 170).

17
ANTHONY D. KING

ture on colonial urbanism has been written based on strictly metropolitan

sources, rather than […] local archival material” (Nasr/Volait 2003: vii–xx).
In what follows, therefore, I refer to recent revisionist writing on the colo-
nial city as exemplary of what might be called an indigenous “critical post-
colonial” perspective. Themes include the agency of the indigenous popula-
tion in producing the colonial city, the indigenous appropriation of the city,
and the larger narrative within which the city is framed.

When was the colonial city?

The stereotypical representation of the colonial city is best expressed by

Frantz Fanon:

The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to re-
call the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools for natives and
schools for Europeans; in the same way we need not recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet if
we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines
of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its order and its geographical layout
will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be organized (1968:
37–38).

Fanon’s words were written over forty five years ago (1961). Whether in rela-
tion to the original, supposedly “decolonized” post-colonial city, or, alterna-
tively, in the supposedly post-imperial city—are they still applicable? We do
not know, because, in one sense, the goal posts have been moved.
Irrespective of changing conditions, at what point in historical time does
the “colonial city” morph into a different category? Is its subsequent identity
(and representation) destined to be either “postcolonial” or to be transformed
(if so, by whom?) into a “world” or “global city,” as suggested, for example,
in regard to one-time colonial cities in Asia by Dick and Rimmer (1998) or
Skeldon (1997)? As Cooper and Stoler point out, peoples’ histories are made
up “of more than the fact that they were colonized” (1997: 18). For Goh
(2005), Singapore remains a paradigmatic example of a city that occupies
both identities and exploits them to its advantage. What is not considered
here, however, fifty years after independence, are the persistent social and
spatial maldistributions of resources (schools, jobs, transport, income) among
the population in some postcolonial cities (King 2004). But are such inequi-
ties “postcolonial” through neglect, are they the result of oppressive, neocolo-
nial regimes following independence, or has the nature and conditions of the
debate changed, as in postcolonial, postapartheid South Africa (Murray/
Shepherd 2006)?

18
 POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

The colonial city revisited:

“Indigenous” postcolonial critiques

Different perspectives, interpretations, and representations of the colonial city

result from the use of different sources, frameworks, and methods. Yeoh’s
study Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in
Colonial Singapore is based on a detailed study of local archives. It is perhaps
the first account challenging the notion of the colonial city as being simply a
product of “dominant” (Western) “forces” and representing the city as the
product of indigenous agency (1996: 9–14). Two other examples are worth
citing because they address what is perhaps the most central feature said to
characterize the colonial city, namely, the racial, social, and spatial divide
between the indigenous city and European colonial settlement.
Hosagrahar’s study of “old Delhi” between the 1850s and l950s examines
transformations in the indigenous city during a century of colonial presence,
this latter first represented by a “typical” colonial urban settlement of “civil
station” and military cantonment and, from 1911, the new colonial capital of
New Delhi. Eschewing binary classifications between colonial/indigenous,
new/old, European/native, “modern”/“traditional,” she investigates the spatial
development of Delhi over a century using an array of different source mate-
rials, including contemporary interviews. “Beneath the apparent opposition,”
she writes, was a charged interconnection between the two spaces. The resi-
dents of Delhi responded to the new model of urban life by “disdaining and
rejecting, mocking and mimicking, participating and conniving, and learning
and accepting” from the colonial Western lifestyle. The new colonial settle-
ment offered opportunities for some Indian residents to construct new identi-
ties, a way of identifying with the new by rejecting the old, and, on occasion,
moving between the two spaces (2005). Chattopadhyay’s Representing Cal-
cutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (2005) brings yet
another perspective to the “colonial city” and its supposedly defining attrib-
utes. She reads the city primarily as the cradle of Bengal nationalism, subvert-
ing its colonial representation as a space marked simplistically by the
Manichaean division between the “European city” and the “black town.” While
such labels certainly exist in European maps and the Anglophone colonial
literature, in Bengali accounts of the city she examines, Chattopadhyay finds
no evidence of these or comparable terms.
What these studies show is the contested and ambiguous space of “the
colonial city” represented in these recent accounts, postcolonial in both senses
of the term (see also Glover, forthcoming). It was, and is, a space too complex
and unpredictable for easy classification. While these latest studies might be
based on previously unexamined indigenous language sources, or the interro-
gation of official colonial accounts, they also frame the “colonial city” within

19
ANTHONY D. KING

a different narrative. Most commonly it is the discursive space of “modernity,”

or the role of the city’s inhabitants in the emergence of a collective (and resis-
tant) national, regional, or perhaps gendered identity. In Kusno’s study of Ja-
karta, he states “(m)odern architecture and urbanism in the colonial and post-
colonial world have generally been understood in relation to European domi-
nation.” Instead, he “explores the theme from another perspective: as a colo-
nial gift inherited by the postcolonial (society and) state” (Kusno 2000:
cover). He takes the Western obsession with (oversimplified) “east-west” an-
tagonisms and redirects his focus to political relations within the region. Re-
garding Indonesia, he foregrounds the persistence of colonial oppression in
the supposedly “postcolonial” regimes themselves.

Postcolonial cities: Postcolonial criticism

Compared to colonial cities, postcolonial cities have received far less aca-
demic attention.4 There are some obvious explanations.
As stated, postcolonialism is concerned with colonialism’s after effects,
including its constructions of knowledge. Depending on the author, its poli-
tico-intellectual formation can be informed by poststructuralist, feminist, psy-
choanalytic and other perspectives. It is also an intellectual position that has
been criticized from different viewpoints. The most trenchant criticism sug-
gests that it “re-orient(s) the globe once more around a single, binary opposi-
tion: colonial/postcolonial … (such that) Colonialism returns at the moment
of its disappearance” (McClintock 1992; King 2004).
Resistance to representing “fully independent” states and cities as largely
uninfluenced by their colonial past is one explanation why “postcolonial”
does not figure as an analytical category. For other (and not just “Western“)
urbanists, the “world space” in which they operate, prior to the imagined “glob-
al” of the late 1980s, is the (obsolescent?) one of the “three worlds,” conceived
in 1953 (Wolff-Phillips 1987). Though the “third world city” concept was
probably in circulation before Tinker’s Race and the Third World City (l97l),
representation of many postcolonial cities has been subsumed within this
ideological framework. Here, postcolonial cities are viewed through the lens

4 Googling “postcolonial city/cities, postkoloniale stadt/staedte, ville/villes post-

coloniale,” brings up numerous references, mostly book titles. Themes addressed
include representation in the arts, sites of tension and citizenship, their role in
“Westernization” and in flows of capital, migration, and terrorism, their shaping
by imperial legacies and tradition, questions of subjectivity, multiculturalism,
hybridity, nationalism, modernity, globalization, etc. Specifically mentioned cit-
ies include Bombay/Mumbai, Cairo, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Dakar, Delhi, Jaipur,
Jakarta, Lagos, London, Melbourne, Rabat, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Tunis.
Apart from one article on Bombay/Mumbai, I found no reference to religion.

20
 POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

of “third world problems”: air pollution, megacity size, traffic management,

“slums,” and water scarcity. Questions about religious or cultural identity and
subject formation do not figure here. What Venn (2006) refers to as “the ne-
glected interface between urban studies and development studies” (cf. also
Robinson 2005), means that cities in different continents are not only repre-
sented through different theoretical and methodological frameworks, but also
that their interconnections are ignored. While a postcolonial perspective does
make this connection, it is clear that “world,” “global,” “colonial/postcolo-
nial,” and “first/third world” cities are all labels invented in the West.

Postcolonial cities

How is the postcolonial city recognized? This depends on how the term is
understood. Cities are not necessarily postcolonial in the same way.
Yeoh suggests that “for some, postcolonialism is something fairly tangi-
ble” (2001: 456). In one interpretation of this “tangibility,” Bishop et al., re-
ferring to Singapore, argue, “post (after) doesn’t necessarily indicate either
that the colonizers have gone away […] or that the conditions of postcolonial-
ism have necessarily changed much from those of colonialism, despite ap-
pearances” (2003: 14). Here, postcolonialism is seen as the failure of decolo-
nization.
Elsewhere I have referred to “actually existing postcolonialism” (King 2003),
particularly as manifested in the spatial environments of one-time colonial
urban landscapes used to help institutionalize (and also symbolize) social rela-
tions of exclusion, segregation, and privilege based on race, class, and power,
and which, fifty years after independence, continue to do so, albeit in modi-
fied form.
Yeoh (2001) provides an extensive review of literature on the geography
of postcolonial cities, focusing on themes of identity, heritage, and encoun-
ters. Depending on our viewpoint, these may (or may not) be seen as belong-
ing to a more positive interpretation of “postcolonialism,” one adopting a non-
Western “occidentalist” perspective, and viewing the one-time colonial city as
“a gift” (Kusno 2000).
The postcolonial city is “an important site where claims of identity differ-
ent from the colonial past are expressed and indexed, and, in some cases,
keenly contested” (Yeoh 2001: 458). This is seen especially in regard to mat-
ters of space, architecture, and urban design, the public signs of which are
often fiercely contested political and social positions. Many studies detail the
various ways in which postcolonial states and cities have both engaged with
and simultaneously distanced themselves from their colonial past, aiming to
construct new citizen identities with a consciousness of national culture. States

21
ANTHONY D. KING

have built new capitals or capitol complexes (Perera 1998; Vale 1992); topo-
nymic reinscription aims to reclaim the cultural space of city streets (King
1976; King 2004; Yeoh 1996); modernist design attempts to create new im-
ages for the nation (Kusno 2000; Holston 1989). Constructing “the world’s
tallest building” has become an essentially competitive strategy for postcolo-
nial nations to make claims on others’ definitions of modernity, or establish
them as “global players” (King 2004). A recent contender, a 710 meter sky-
scraper planned for Noida, near Delhi, according to the architect, aims “to
show the world what India can do” (Guardian, 29 March 2005). Such projects
are thought to provide a nation’s leaders, and perhaps its people, with a new,
more positive identity.
An increasing number of authorities have argued for the preservation of
the architecture, urban design, and planning of one-time colonial cities, in-
cluding UNESCO’s International Committee on Monuments and Sites (ICO-
MOS). Unprecedented rural migration and what are seen as overdependence
on state-led development projects imposing Western urban models are behind
attempts to prevent “the disappearance of the Asian city,” including its colo-
nial history (Logan 2002; Lari/Lari 2001). In this perspective, fifty years after
independence, the symbolic significance of colonial buildings has lost its old
political meaning. New generations see colonial urban design as generating
tourist revenue rather than prompting memories of colonial oppression.
Yet few such reports represent buildings and spaces not just as aesthetic
but also as cultural, social, and political phenomena. The elite Dutch colonial
suburb of Menteng, outside Jakarta, with its Art Deco houses and spacious
tree-lined boulevards, continues, as in colonial days, to house the rich and
powerful elite (including ex-President Suharto). In Korea’s capital, Seoul, the
neo-baroque Japanese Government-General headquarters building, constructed
in 1926 from the designs of a German architect, and, after 1945, used as the
City Hall and subsequently the National Museum of Contemporary Art, was
ceremoniously demolished in 1995—significantly, on the 50th anniversary of
Korea’s liberation from Japan. It restored the appearance of Korea’s Gyeong-
bok Palace, “the most important symbol of (our) national history,” and the
seat of the 500-year-old Korean Choseun Dynasty (Kal 2003).

Cities: Postcolonial or postimperial?

So far I have assumed that “postcolonial” refers only to those cities in for-
merly colonized societies and “postimperial” to those one-time imperial capi-
tals such as Paris, Lisbon, or London. However, the distinction between post-
colonial and postimperial can be ambivalent. Labeling London as (techni-
cally) postimperial foregrounds its earlier imperial role. Yet for postcolonial

22
 POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

migrants from South Asia, London may also (like them) be postcolonial. And
as the one-time metropole has been powerfully influenced by postcolonial
forces, “postcolonial” is now used to describe it, particularly in regard to its
ethnic and racial composition. Whether we live in a postcolonial world, or
more accurately, in The Colonial Present (Gregory 2003), colonial and post-
colonial histories of migration and memory not only distinguish the popula-
tion, politics, and public culture of one postcolonial city from another, but
also from other “world” or “global cities” such as Frankfurt or Zurich.5
For example, over half of the almost 30 percent foreign-born population
of New York are from the Caribbean and Central America, with significant
proportions from Europe, South America, and South and Southeast Asia
(Salvo/Lord 1997). Any explanation for the presence of, for example, English-
speaking migrants from the Caribbean, or South and Southeast Asia6 must
recognize colonial and postcolonial histories. This is equally so with the
Spanish-speaking migrants from the Caribbean and Central and South Amer-
ica. In London, of the roughly 25 per cent of ‘foreign born’ population, the
large majority are principally from postcolonial countries, particularly South/
Southeast Asia, Ireland, East, West and South Africa, the Caribbean, North
America, and Australia, as well as from continental Europe (Merriman 1993;
Benedictus 2005). In Paris, the more than 15 percent of foreign-born residents
are primarily from postcolonial North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia),
Armenia, or Mauritius (Ambroise-Rendu 1993).
These distinctively postcolonial migrations clearly have major influences
on the economy, society, culture, politics, spatial environments, and, in some
cases, security, of the city. They bring to the so-called “global city” a variety
of vibrant but also very specific post-colonial cosmopolitanisms. Powerful
postcolonial minorities bring their influence to bear on government policies,
both domestic (immigration, employment, educational, press freedom or wel-
fare) or foreign (international disputes, disaster relief, and the conduct of
war).7 Multiple temporalities coexist in urban space, as do multiple spatiali-

5 How postcolonialism impacts these and other European cities is still to be ex-
plored.
6 South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) accounts for some fifty percent of cab-
drivers in New York City, and (Anglophone) Indians are prominently repre-
sented in the information technology and medical professions in the USA.
7 Media coverage of the four July 7 suicide bombers in London focused almost
exclusively on their British citizenship and “Islamist fundamentalist” identity.
Yet the specific motivation of the bombings, widely believed by a majority of
the public (though not, Prime Minister Tony Blair) to be Blair’s complicity in the
US-lead attack on Iraq, was also seen as a response to the decades-long history
of British and US colonial oppression in the Middle East, including Britain’s
colonial role in early twentieth century Iraq (cf. Gregory 2003). The shift in
media sentiment towards Pakistani-born residents in the UK in the three months
between the July bombings and early October, when Pakistan and Indian

23
ANTHONY D. KING

ties, extending the real and the virtual space of the city and its inhabitants to
other urban and rural locations around the world (Venn 2006).
The growing outsourcing of employment from North America and the UK
to the large Anglophone labor market in Indian cities (especially call centers),
generating employment and a boom in office building, cannot be understood
without a postcolonial frame (King 2004). In Paris, as the riots of November
2005 have exposed, most postcolonial minorities are in the banlieues, which,
already “in the 1990s, have become a byword for socially disadvantaged pe-
ripheral areas of French cities” (Hargreaves/McKinney 1997: 12). Structurally
equivalent to British and American inner city areas, and seen as ghettoes, the
banlieues provide a space to develop “a separatist cultural agenda marked by
graffiti, music, dancing, and dress codes” with which the banlieusards (sub-
urb-dwellers) reterritorialize the “anonymous housing projects” (ibid). In
Britain, the inner suburban landscapes of postcolonial London are regenerated
and transformed by South Asians, who, “though united by belief, are nonethe-
less divided along national, ethnic and sectarian lines” (Nasser 2003: 9). In
Britain’s “second city” of Birmingham, the largest group of 80,000 South
Asian Muslims is from Pakistan, comprising 7 percent of the city’s population
(ibid. 2003:9). Leicester, with 28 percent of its 280,000 population from
South Asia, is said to be “the largest Indian city in Europe.” Though Viet-
namese scholar Panivong Norindr writes, “policies of colonial urbanism help
to explain race and class divisions in Western metrocenters of today” (1996:
114), we need to recognize that individual urban authorities have their own
distinctive policies regarding housing, planning, and education. In multicul-
tural societies, members of particular communities (like the British overseas)
frequently stay together, with their own shops, social centers, and places of
worship.
Long after the formal end of empire, postcolonial memories continue to
affect the use of space. Jacobs (1996) shows how the continuity of discourses
over historic sites in the City of London, remembered as “the economic center
of the Empire,” have influenced decisions about urban design. Yet conscious-
ness of the postcolonial multicultural is also powerfully celebratory. It signi-
fies a changing, vibrant future, a new kind of intellectual milieu created by
unique ethnicities, hybridities, and diasporas. New and distinctive cultures
develop in geographically and culturally specific “postcolonial cities.” Whether
in the one-time metropole or the one-time colony, postcolonialism creates

Kashmir were struck by the most disastrous earthquake in their history, with tens
of thousands of victims, was palpable. With over 700,000 residents of Pakistani
birth/ descent in Britain, mostly from the Kashmir region, and many British na-
tionals, the mood of the tabloid media shifted from suspended suspicion to one
of sympathy and shared loss, followed by a major fund-raising campaign for sur-
vivors.

24
 POSTCOLONIAL CITIES, POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

conditions for both the split, as well as the suture between “traditional” and
“modern” identities.
Attributes that distinguish postcolonial populations—a language in com-
mon with the host society, a shared, if contested, history, some familiarity
with the culture, norms, and social practices of the metropolitan society, the
presence of long-established communities, are features among others which
distinguish postcolonial communities and migrants from those of non-postco-
lonial origin. In this way, “multicultural” Berlin differs from multicultural
London or Vancouver.
I have not addressed here the more metaphorical uses of the terms, yet
clearly colonial/postcolonial are also relevant in describing the processes of
urbanism in contemporary Europe. Today, newly colonized populations in
cities—migrant labor, legal as well as legal, arrives from all over the world,
including Eastern Europe, filling the lowest paid slots in an ever increasingly
globalized economy. Labor is colonized by capital.
Sidaway (2000) and Domosh (2004) show how the postcolonial paradigm
has now expanded to cover many historical and geographical instances.
Though not sufficient in themselves, postcolonial histories, sociologies, and
geographies are nonetheless key to understanding a plethora of issues, and not
only in the multicultural, postcolonial/postimperial global cities of Melbourne
or Toronto. “Postcolonial vision” results from postcolonial migration and glob-
alization (Hopkins 2002). It is a comparative, cross-cultural, and cross-tempo-
ral perspective. Despite its ambiguity, the paradigm provides one among many
ways of reading the contemporary city.

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Wright, Gwendolyn (1991) The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urban-

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C ont est ed Pla c es and t he Po lit ics of Sp ac e

HELMUTH BERKING

This article deals with certain problems related to efforts to conceptualize the
spatial dimensions of urban conflicts. Since it is no coincidence that urban
conflicts are so intimately interwoven with territorial claims, I will focus on
the peculiar interplay between agency and territoriality using the still fuzzy
conceptualizations of the global-local interplay as a prime example.

Fierce debates about space and place run deep in the social sciences today.
Attempts to spatialize social theory go hand in hand with a far-reaching cri-
tique of well-established sociological concepts, and this dramatic change of
perspective seems to be establishing a new and quite revolutionary paradigm
of social theory. The historical distance between banalizing, or even negating,
and negotiating space has been an amazingly short one. Two decades ago the
British sociologist Peter Saunders was just expressing common sense when he
stated that “social theory has been quite right to treat space as a backdrop
against which social action takes place […] Space does not enter into what we
do in any meaningful sense, because mere space can have no causal properties
and is quite incapable of entering into anything. It is passive; it is context.”
And, he concludes, “that there is nothing for theory to say about space”
(Saunders 1989: 231f.).
This was, of course, only moments before globalization discourse finally
took off, forcing social scientists to come to terms with a phenomenology of
the social, basically evoked by processes of socio-spatial reconfigurations and
new modes of the spatial organization of social relations. To realize the radi-
cal shift to space-related theorizing, one only needs to bear in mind that the
global is first and foremost nothing other than a socio-spatial scale that, while

29
HELMUTH BERKING

relationally differentiated, is also tied into the logic of scale: of the local, the
regional, and the national. If one eliminated this relationality of scale, the
story of globalization could not be narrated at all.
In outlining this background, I will use quotidian conceptualizations of the
global-local nexus as a point of departure to offer some critical comments on
the—thus far—neglected question of the local. Reflections on the global pro-
duction of locality, so the thesis goes, might not only change the dominant re-
presentation of the global. They might also redirect theoretical attention to the
power of places. But before I take a closer look at the different stages of glob-
alization discourse to characterize the particular state of space representations,
I will briefly summarize some of the guiding premises of this undertaking.
First, it has now become almost conventional wisdom to conceptualize space
as a social construction that simultaneously structures and is structured by so-
cial action. Human agency itself has to be looked at in its space-producing
and space-consuming qualities. It was Emile Durkheim (1965) who, in his fa-
mous book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, formulated the idea that
the spatial organization of groups serves as a prime model for the mental or-
ganization of the world. If the focus is placed on the spatial nature of identi-
ties, meanings, classifications, world-view structures, etc., this could prove to
be an analytically promising way to conceptualize all kinds of social action—
from the most intimate face-to-face interaction to global conflicts—as distinc-
tive variants of a “politics of space.”
Second, two general modes of spatiality, or more precisely, of the spatial
organization of social relations, can be distinguished. Social relations can be
territorialized relying on a well-defined and forcefully maintained territorial
unit which clearly marks inside and outside and gives meaning to legitimacy,
rule enforcement, and collective identity. Or they can be organized in a deter-
ritorialized way that does not depend on borders and territorial enclosures, but
on far-reaching networks. The former space-as-container theory is attributed
to the territorial nation-state and its dominant epistemology, which sees social
relations being both organized and reproduced exclusively in territorially de-
fined and spatially isomorphic entities. The later space-as-flows ontology
(Castells 1996; 1997) is usually imagined with reference to the space-tran-
scending strategies of global capital as well as to the particular space-related
politics of translocalities and global diasporas.
Third, there appears to be an intimate and quite disturbing relationship be-
tween space production and identities. Just as space is always a relational product
of multiple trajectories, interactions, practices, conflicts, and struggles be-
tween social groups (cf. Löw 2001), so are identities, be they ascribed to
places and/or to individuals and collective actors. Categorical identities, how-
ever, have a tendency to become territorialized. Territorial identities fuel the
politics of space. A similarly complicated relation exists between space produc-

30
 CONTESTED PLACES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE

tion and knowledge production. The now famous Foucauldian power-knowl-

edge nexus may have to be extended and transformed into a power-knowl-
edge-space relation. On a quite simple level, it is important to realize that if
the production of space goes hand in hand with the evocation of knowledge,
then knowledge is space-related. Certain spaces and places do not only con-
tain distinctive stocks of cultural knowledge; they also limit the scope of what
might be perceived as legitimate knowing. “Placing” categories give meaning
to categories like gender, class, ethnicity, etc., just as categories give particu-
lar meaning to places. The postcolonial decentering of Eurocentric world-
view structures is just one—albeit important—case in point. Common refer-
ences to “local cultures” might be another.
Fourth, if spatial patterns, from the physically built environment to sym-
bolic landscapes and categorical identities, can—and probably have to—be
discerned as place-related, then the shift of theoretical attention from the
global to the logic of locality might be indeed not only feasible but necessary.
Since all these issues are negotiated under the header of globalization as a
new spatial order, I will briefly describe some of the basic controversies with-
in this field.
It is not by accident that in a first round of globalization studies the na-
tion-state served as a privileged point of departure to depict the “global” as its
opposite. And it is not by accident either that urban studies, and especially
world- and global-city models became the prime examples for identifying
alternative modes of spatial organization. The notion of a world consisting of
a multiplicity of territorially fixed, hermetically sealed, culturally homogene-
ous entities for which “territoriality” is the only and exclusive model of spa-
tial organization—aptly characterized as “methodological nationalism” by
Anthony Smith (1979)—was abandoned by multiple deterritorialization ap-
proaches that revealed globalization to be an ongoing process of production of
spaces of flows against which the now traditional spaces of place are bound
systematically to loose momentum. The thesis of the end of the nation-state
was grounded in the thesis of the end of territoriality. And this theorizing
paved the way for both a highly generalized, powerful image of the “global”
as an unfettered, free, and unbounded space, and a highly generalized, paling
image of the local as relict of the past.
All strands of globalization theories claim that the global has become the
most important frame for organizing socio-spatial relations. Standard defini-
tions, which depict globalization as all those “processes by which the peoples
of the world are incorporated into a single world society, a global society”
(Albrow 1996), however, are underestimating, or even neglecting, the con-
text-generating potentiality of the local by reducing this spatial scale to a tra-
ditional and territorialized form of socio-spatial relations. The question of
what the global actually is has tended as a rule to be answered by referring

31
HELMUTH BERKING

rather vaguely to the disappearance of the local. As a cumulative effect of

globalization—flexible accumulation, global migration, deregulation, media-
generated images of the world, new communication technologies, and so
forth—processes of space formation could be discerned, which for some
authors seemed to support images of cultural homogenization. Whether it was
depicted as a totally Americanized, McDonaldized culture (Ritzer 1993), or as
a generalized consumerist culture exploited by transnational corporations and
ruled by a new emerging transnational class (Sklair 2001), in these views the
global, “world society,” and so forth derived from and represented first and
foremost the geographic expansion of the West. Fettered by an unreflected
technological determinism—globalization is as inevitable as technological
change—such narratives represented, at least to a certain extent, continuations
of the old functionalist modernization approaches (cf. Massey 1999; Wimmer
2001).
It was during the second stage of the globalization discourse, looking be-
yond mere economic globalization, when social scientists began to reject the
homogenization paradigm. Instead of conceptualizing globalization as an on-
going process of economic, political, and cultural homogenization—the story
of the outward expansion of European modernity—analytical attention was
directed to the emergence of new societal forms, the mixing of local and
global under the headers of “glocalization” (Robertson 1995), “creolization”
(Hannerz 1996), and “hybridization” (Pieterse 1995; Hall 1991; Tomlinson
1999; Urry 2000). Attempts to criticize methodological Eurocentrism went
hand in hand with forceful debates on “global modernities” (Featherstone et
al. 1995), “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000), or “uneven modernities”
(Randeria 2002). New key concepts like “cosmopolitanism” (Learmount/Ver-
tovec/Cohen 2002; Beck 2000; Hannerz 1996) and “diaspora” (Clifford 1997;
Hall 1990; Gilroy 1993; Cohen 1997; critically: Anthias 1998; Mitchell 1997)
promised to capture the impact of these global-local interplays on worldview
structures, cultural knowledge, and identity constructions. But even though
particular emphasis was placed on cultural syncretism and the crucial global-
local nexus, a kind of overblown representation of the global as a free, un-
bounded, and deterritorialized space of flows still remains in place. The pit-
falls of this representation of the global seem to be at least threefold.
First, contrary to conceptualizations of globalization as an inevitable
process of deterritorialization and state erosion, territoriality in general, and
territorial states in particular, seem destined to remain powerful organizational
modes of socio-spatial relations. If what we identify as global is still “groun-
ded in national territories” (Sassen 1996: 13), then theoretical attention has to
be directed to processes of spatial reconfiguration which do not necessarily
end up in deterritorialized flows but also include powerful tendencies toward
re-territorialization. The fact that “capitalism,” the “nation-state,” or the “daily

32
 CONTESTED PLACES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE

newspaper” have gained global presence does not imply that India Today, the
Boston Globe, and the Darmstädter Echo are becoming indistinguishable.
Poverty is contextualized differently in Poland than it is in Zambia; migrants
are confronted with different institutional regimes in England and in Saudi
Arabia; and even average Americans may have a media-transmitted view of
the Arab world which is significantly different from the one held by a Ger-
man. In short, the constraints which local cultures impose on global flows are
and will remain quite considerable.
Second, it is, in analytical terms, not convincing to connect socio-spatial
scales like the local and the global with modes of socio-spatial organization.
For what reasons should the local be conceptualized as a territorial mode of
sociation, while the global is perceived exclusively as a deterritorialized space
of flows?
Third, there is a strong tendency toward categorical confusion in the way
that the global and the local are incessantly used as synonyms for space and
place and vice versa. “Opposing global with local,” states Robert Latham, “is
quite intuitive since the former term ultimately refers to some kind of claim
about the range of forces operating across space. Typically, the local is either
a discrete element within that global range or simply a site or phenomenon
subject to global forces that are external to it” (Latham/Kassimir/Callaghy
2001: 6). If one, just for the sake of the argument, follows Bruno Latour’s
thought experiment concerning the Eurasian railway system (Latour 1993),
the dilemma involved becomes obvious. Not really global, though of consid-
erable reach, this system stretches from Gibraltar to Vladivostok, from Hanoi
to Bergen. But at every point on our imagined journey we will find people,
huts, villages, stations, and so forth. Most important, however, nobody, nei-
ther the traveler nor the conductor, ever crosses the magic border that sepa-
rates the local from the global. And is this not equally the case with transna-
tional corporations, whose global networks are composed of local branches
designed to exploit local conditions as effectively as possible? And those
global flows: of people, images, cultural artifacts? Do they not unfold their
social and symbolic potential only at the moment in which they are re-
grounded and reembedded locally? Or as Doreen Massey strongly insists:
“Could global finance exist without its very definite groundedness in that
place, the city of London, for example. Could it be global without being lo-
cal?” (Massey 2004: 8).
Yet representations of the global opposing the local still remain in place,
feeding a power matrix for which the global is closely associated with capital,
progress deterritorialization, and unbounded space, while the local is linked to
place and tradition, inhabited by the usual suspects: the poor, minorities,
women entrapped in local cultures and generally victims of outside forces
(Massey 2006). The devaluation of the local parallels the devaluation of place

33
HELMUTH BERKING

(Agnew 1989). To imagine the local as a product of the global is to imagine

place as the product of relations from elsewhere, implying that place has no
agency since all that matters has to be placed outside of place. But the very
fact that places are also the moments “through which the global is constituted,
invented, coordinated, produced,” in short: that places, as Doreen Massey
states, are “agents in globalisation” (2004: 11) must be seen as quite incon-
testable if one looks for example at London or New York City as places for
which nobody would willingly assume the status of pure victims of global
forces.
Given these insights, a provisional subtotal of three decades of globaliza-
tion discourse supports the impression that a major shift of theoretical atten-
tion is under way. After the discovery of the global it is now the revaluation
of the local, or more precisely: explorations of place and locality that have to
be foregrounded. In a phenomenological tradition locality refers to the con-
struction of that peculiar horizon of closeness, familiarity, and knowing by
which individuals and groups (re)produce themselves. The production of lo-
cality as a daily effort of everyday life practices implies the thesis that local
settings and places are not just context-driven spatial units but have a context-
generating potential as well.
This search for the relatedness of agency and space has had a profound
impact on urban studies, especially on the mode in which the “city” is con-
structed as an object of scientific knowledge. I only exaggerate slightly in stating
that since its emergence/inception as a scientific object, the city has been dealt
with primarily as a subcategory of such concepts as society, modernization,
market economy, and so forth. This logic of subsumption, paired with an un-
enlightened functionalism, has a longstanding tradition that goes back to the
Chicago school of urban studies, for which not the city of Chicago, but the
city as a field of experience, a laboratory of social change, deviance, segrega-
tion, etc. was of prime interest. It continues with the new urban-studies ap-
proach, which analyzes the systemic function of the city within the transfor-
mation processes of capitalist sociation. And even global-city research was
blamed for reducing the city to its geostrategic position and role within eco-
nomic globalization—and thus not only for neglecting but for systematically
missing the cultural and discursive strategies of constructing the particularity
of a city. The critique, aptly formulated years ago by John Friedman, that
global-city models miss the locality of their objects, “their rootedness in a
politically organized life space with its own history, institutions, culture and
politics” is still topical (1995: 34). Berlin is not Prussia, but without Prussia,
Berlin would not be Berlin.
Another quite noteworthy strand in urban studies is the position certain
cities hold as kind of showcases within the historical geography of urban
thinking (cf. Crang/Thrift 2001). For decades Chicago served as an uncontest-

34
 CONTESTED PLACES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE

ed model for urban growth. Nineteenth-century Paris became a metonym for

urbanity and modernity, Los Angeles represented the postmodern sans phrase,
and New York seemed to be the archetypical global city.
In all these cases the undercurrent that place has no agency seems to be
taken as a given. But is it not time to redirect analytical attention to the par-
ticularity of a particular city? Is it not time to conceptualize the various modes
of the production of locality in a comparative perspective with a view to iden-
tifying local classification systems, stocks of knowledge, and the role they
play in constituting, contesting, receiving, and changing whatever is meant by
the global?
Cities are more than nodal points within the global space of flows, more
than locations of a headquarter economy of global capitalism, more than
touchdown areas for various globally circulating artifacts. They belong his-
torically and systematically to that space of places for which territoriality,
habitus and habitat, place-making, and politics of space, in short: all those
efforts that go into the production of locality, are quintessential (cf. Berking
2002).
One of the major obstacles encountered in conceptualizing locality is op-
posing space and place, associating place with groundedness, concreteness,
authenticity, and territorial enclosure. But as long as the global is not the out-
side-of-the-local, space is not the outside-of-place. Following the line of ar-
gument advanced by Henry Lefèbvre (1991), namely that social groups, clas-
ses, or factions of classes cannot constitute themselves or recognize one an-
other as subjects unless they generate or produce a space, the production of
space must always been seen as embedded in processes of place-making. To
analyze the concreteness of a place, however, does not necessarily mean fo-
cusing solely on local preconditions and falling into the trap of buying into
the idea of territorial enclosure. The question, then, is whether social sciences
should not make use of the geographic concept of scale to avoid any romanti-
cized notions of place. Socio-spatial scales do structure and order perception.
They are socially constructed by individuals and groups who, via this politics
of spatial distance, create borders, mark belongings, and territorialize identi-
ties. If one takes the body-related space of proximity, the local, the regional,
the national, the global, as typical relational socio-spatial scales, the theoreti-
cal challenge would be not to limit concepts of place and locality to the local
but to use all socio-spatial scales from the local to the global to depict the
reach and deep structure of this particular place.
On the surface, it is easy to describe the politics of space. When the city
council of Chicago, for example, decided years ago to give leeway for ethnic
minorities to rename their residential areas in keeping with their origins, De-
von street became Indhira Ghandi Boulevard at the heart of the Indian com-
munity, changing to Golda Meir Street only two blocks away, while simply

35
HELMUTH BERKING

remaining Devon for the rest of the population. The interesting point here is
that even though the majority of Indians do not live on Indhira Ghandi Boule-
vard, this place has not only become an attractive tourist site for ethnic food
and fashion, but also a highly contested space used by Bangladeshi and Paki-
stani youth movements to protest against whatever they find amiss in politics
in India. This example demonstrates both: that place-making has a territorial-
izing aspect and that the agency of place can not be fully understood as exclu-
sively confined to the local.
But the question of the production of locality runs much deeper inasmuch
as its aim is to depict the very particularity of cities. In an impressive com-
parative study covering New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Janet Abu-
Lughod addressed the logics of the production of locality in an attempt to un-
veil the “unique personalities” of these cities. What started out as an incisive
critique of the ahistorical and overgeneralized character of global-city re-
search, and is then followed by an exemplary historical reconstruction of the
natural, the spatial and climatic preconditions and an in-depth analysis of the
interactive relatedness to the world, the migration-related changes in the
economy, politics, and culture of these cities finally leads to a precise descrip-
tion of three distinct local cultures whose spatial forms, logics of incorpora-
tion, life styles, and local politics could not be more different. That the very
construction of urban space plays a major role in constituting the biography of
these cities is beyond doubt. “Spatial patterns are deeply associated with
variations in social life and the relationships among residents, and it is these
social relations that yield differences in the patterns of urban living that give
to each city its quintessential character” (1999: 3). Although Abu-Lughod is
of course aware of the problem that much of what has happened within these
cities is placed in quite different and distant geographic spaces, she nonethe-
less is able to demonstrate the extent to which answers and solutions are lo-
cally contextualized. That the end of Fordist reconstruction affected Chicago
in a quite different way than it did L.A. or New York, that the socio-spatial
concentration of Latinos in L.A. places constraints on ethnic coalitions and
the politics of identity, while New York, thanks to its ethic diversity, is still
doomed to play the ethnic poker game and Chicago remains entrapped in its
longstanding racist color line—these are only some of the local structurations
which determine the atmosphere, but also the action and problem-solving ca-
pacities of the three cities. Even individuals seem to be forced to adapt ha-
bitually to the particular style of a particular city. “Space in New York,” Abu-
Lughod claims, citing journalist Joseph Giovannini, “collects people; in Los
Angeles it separates them.” And: “If you drop any New Yorker other than
Woody Allen in Los Angeles, he will eventually become acquisitive about
cars … if you drop any Angelo other than the Beach Boys in New York, he

36
 CONTESTED PLACES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE

will eventually choose his neckties for their coded social meanings” (Giovan-
nini, quoted after Abu-Lughod 1999: 423).
If we transferred into the field of sociology Ulf Hannerz’ critique of urban
anthropology as anthropology in the city that needs to be complemented by an
anthropology of the city, we might be more than tempted to contemplate a
concept of a sociology of cities.
British cultural geographer Doreen Massey has suggested conceptualizing
places as products of social relations, as “meeting places.” “This is a notion of
place where specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from
some mythical internal roots nor from a history of relative isolation […] but
precisely from the absolute particularity of the mixture of influence found
together there” (1999: 22). If one attempts to describe the particular character
of a place with a view to the way in which the world is represented here as
compared to there, one might be able to uncover the cumulative structure of
local cultures, the physical and symbolic sediments of a city, as those decisive
materials which give particular meaning to action orientation and future op-
portunity structures. Focusing on the production of locality might offer not
only an alternative perspective on cities as an object of scientific knowledge
but also a prospect for producing a knowledge that, beyond global talk, could
contribute significantly to clarifying the still fuzzy problem of the global-local
interplay.

Re f e r e n c e s

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University of Minnesota Press.
Agnew, John (1989) “The Devaluation of Place in Social Science”. In John
Agnew/Peter Duncan (eds.) The Power of Place, Boston: Unwin Hyman,
pp. 9–29.
Albrow, Martin (1996) The Global Age. State and Society beyond Modernity,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Anthias, Floya (1998) “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’: Beyond Ethnicity?” Sociology
32, pp. 557–580.
Beck, Ulrich (1997) Was ist Globalisierung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Beck, Ulrich (2000) “The Cosmopolitan Perspective”. British Journal of So-
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Berking, Helmuth (2002) “Global Village oder urbane Globalität”. In Hel-
muth Berking/Richard Faber (eds.) Städte im Globalisierungsdiskurs,
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 11–25.
Castells, Manuel (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge: Black-
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HELMUTH BERKING

Castells, Manuel (1997) The Power of Identity, Cambridge: Blackwell.

Clifford, James (1997) Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
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Cohen, Robert (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL
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Crang, Mike/Thrift, Nigel (eds., 2000) Thinking Space, London: Routledge.
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Eisenstadt, Samuel (2000) “Multiple Modernities”. Daedalus 129/1, pp. 1–29.
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Spatialization of Social Theory: An Introduction”. In Mike Feather-
stone/Scott Lash/Roland Robertson (eds.) Global Modernities, London:
Sage, pp. 1–24.
Friedman, Jonathan (1995) “Where we Stand: A Decade of World City Re-
search”. In P. Knox/P.J. Taylor (eds.) World Cities in a World System,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.21–47.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic, London: Verso.
Hall, Stuart (1990) “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. In John Rutherford (ed.)
Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Hannerz, Ulf (1996) Transnational Connections, Culture, People, Places,
London & New York: Routledge.
Latham, Robert/Kassimir, Ronald/Callaghy, Thomas (2001) “Introduction.
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Callaghy/Ronald Kassimir/Robert Latham (eds.) Intervention & Transna-
tionalism in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–20.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Learmount, Simon/Vertovec, Stephan/Cohen, Robin (eds., 2002) Conceiving
Cosmopolitanism – Theory, Context, and Practice, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Lefèbvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Löw, Martina (2001) Raumsoziologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Massey, Doreen (1999) Power-geometries and the Politics of Time-space.
Hettner Lecture II, University of Heidelberg.
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naler 86/B: Human Geography, pp. 5–18.
Massey, Doreen (2006) “Keine Entlastung für das Lokale”. In Helmuth Berk-
ing (ed.) Die Macht des Lokalen in einer Welt ohne Grenzen, Frankfurt am
Main: Campus, pp. 25–31.
Mitchell, Katharyne (1997) “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity”.
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Pieterse, Jan (1995) “Globalization as Hybridization”, in: Mike Feather-

stone/Scott Lash/Roland Robertson (eds.) Global Modernities, London:
Sage, pp. 45–68.
Randeria, Shalini (2002) “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities”. In
Yehuda Elkana/Iwan Krastev/Elísio Macamo/Shalini Randeria (eds.) Un-
ravelling Ties – From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness,
Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 284–311.
Ritzer, George (1993) The McDonaldization of Society, Newbury Park, CA:
Pine Forge Press.
Robertson, Roland (1995) “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-
Heterogeneity”. In Mike Featherstone/Scott Lash/Roland Robertson (eds.)
Global Modernities, London: Sage, pp. 25–44.
Sassen, Saskia (1996) Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globaliza-
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Saunders, Peter (1989) “Space, Urbanism and the Created Environment”. In
David Held/John Thompson (eds.) Social Theory of Modern Societies, New
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Sklair, Leslie (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Anthony (1979) Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford.
Tomlinson, John (1999) Globalization and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Studies in Society and History 43/3, pp. 435–466.

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The City a s As s embl age . Dia spori c Culture s,
Post mod ern Spa ce s, and B io polit ics

COUZE VENN

The paper focuses on the emergence of the megacity/postmodern city and ar-
gues that its conceptualisation as space must break with notions of linear de-
velopment and homogenous temporality in the analysis of urban socialities
and in the application of centralised forms of governance to the regulation of
such spaces. I draw attention to diasporic settlements, the co-habitation of
different temporalities and spatialities, the emergence and the co-existence of
discrepant imaginaries and ways of being. There are implications for issues
of identity, biopolitics, and for cultural analysis.

Problematizations

In what follows, I want to focus on what the postcolonial recognition of the

ubiquity of diasporas and the emergence of a new problematic about transcul-
tural processes mean for rethinking the questions of culture and identity from
the point of view of the heterogeneity of spatiality and temporality. One of my
aims is to challenge some long-standing assumptions in the discourse of mod-
ernity about temporality, spatiality, and social imaginaries, although Lefebvre
(1991) already opened up a theoretical space for such an undertaking. In par-
ticular, I will argue that the idea that the ordered community is ideally ethni-
cally homogenous and developmentally “progressive,” an idea central to oc-
cidentalism, is fundamentally incompatible with the mutant, creolised, and
“vernacular” cosmopolitanisms (Hall 1999) that have now become the norm
in the megacity/postmodern city.

41
COUZE VENN

A displacement is therefore necessary at the level of theory, informed, on

the one hand, by the fact that the current phase of globalisation has seen a
massive intensification and extension in the scale of displacement and migra-
tion of people, both at the transnational and the national levels, mostly to ur-
ban spaces throughout the world (Papastergiadis 2000; Sassen 1999). Whilst
the figures themselves—for instance 140 million in 2000, which is far greater
than in any other period (Castles 2000)—give an indication of the change in
scale, the problem is not just about quantities. Rather, the problem is that the
imagination of both the urban and the diasporic, especially with regard to
governance, has largely remained circumscribed by reference to the model of
the state as nation-state, supported by the idea of the nation as ideally ethni-
cally homogeneous. The foundations of this conceptual framework continue
to haunt postcolonial thought (Cheah 2004). Notions of hybridity and multi-
culturalism entertain an ambivalent relationship with this framework, appear-
ing to undermine it, yet open to recuperation by the disciplinary strategies of
governance.
On the other hand, social theory needs to take into account the range of
concepts that have emerged to address problems relating to issues of change,
determination, the nature of the living, historicity, and memory, namely, con-
cepts of complexity, flow, turbulence, emergence, indeterminacy, multiplic-
ity, poiesis. I shall draw from them to propose the standpoint of the city as an
assemblage, and point to the implications for cultural analysis, specifically in
addressing issues of diasporas, the postmodern city, the biopolitics of govern-
ance, and the theorisation of mutations in cultures. One of my aims is to use
this new work to problematize the approach in cultural theory that remains
circumscribed within the conceptual framework of governmentality and gov-
ernance, thus within the purview of knowledge/power that inscribes a particu-
lar imagination of the social world as one amenable to the exercise of a regu-
lating and securitising power.
A related assumption within that problematic of the social is that of the
subject as the rational, autonomous, unitary agent, incarnated in liberalism’s
idea of the self-centered individual. This subject not only doubles as the para-
digm for the citizen of the modern nation-state, but functions as the normative
standard in relation to which all other subjectivities and identities are catego-
rised as lacking in some fundamental way: underdeveloped, or primitive or
lagging behind, or exotic, that is, as “other,” or as deviant. The idea that cul-
tures and identities are fundamentally heterogeneous and mobile, the result of
a history of encounters, exchanges, grafts, borrowings, and admixtures, can-
not find a place within the logic of the older paradigms of identity and social
order.
The point is that the interest of the nation-state from the point of view of
governance has been precisely to constitute itself in the form of a homogene-

42
 THE CITY AS ASSEMBLAGE

ous population, for example, the French, the English—though hierarchised in

terms of class, race, and gender. Or at least, this interest has overdetermined
cultural homogeneity as both the desired goal of its intervention in the domain
of the social and as a condition for its rule. The normalising strategies which
the nation-state has invented in the post-enlightenment period have tried to
achieve this goal through the standardization of language and public conduct;
the normativization of the norms of the normal on the basis of rational knowl-
edges (as science, as Foucault has argued); the democratisation of its system
of authority by founding it in the general will or will of the people; a state-
oriented political economy; and the planned unification of the nation as a sin-
gle community, with the discourse of race and culture playing a key role in
this. It makes sense within these parameters to categorise difference and resis-
tance as pathology, deviance, dysfunction, exoticism, or underdevelopment,
that is, as problems that a disciplinary apparatus could address through the
constitution of specific groups and their allocation to different regimes of
formation and technologies of surveillance.
This form of governmentality and its disciplining strategies were applied
to urban as much as to other spaces, for example the post-revolutionary
Hausmannian redesigning of Paris, or the post-war remaking of cities within
the concept of welfare and insurance, addressing questions dealing with edu-
cation, health, security, employment. These devices were also part of the tech-
nology for (re)constituting the citizen in the modern city, in the attempt to
homogenise, or at least to subject to the same legal regimes, the plural and
mobile groups that have been characteristic of the profile of populations in
cities generally, for instance, in early modern Europe, as Engin Isin (2002)
has established. These apparatuses have been at work in colonial cities, and
continue to operate, if unevenly, in postcolonial conditions. They have come
to be seen as the instruments of modernisation and the signs of progress, so
that implicitly the conceptual coordinates of the state as the nation-state, and
its inscription of ethnic and cultural homogeneity and the point of view of
governance in constituting populations, have become part of the invisible
taken-for-granted, i.e. acting as “doxa” for planners and the social sciences
alike.
Underlying the strategies of development and planning, one finds the as-
sumption of linear temporality and the idea that “progress” or “modern-
isation” is a matter of stages of development that imply the erasure or conver-
sion of the previous state of affairs in favour of more efficient and rational
stages. Both modern governance, and town planning as an instance of it, are
premised on this thinking. Within this perspective, the co-habitation of differ-
ent spatialities and temporalities is seen as a sign of dysfunction, or a side-
effect to be managed by translating discrepant environments either into the
idiom of “heritage,” refigured as an aspect of the “culture industry,” or into

43
COUZE VENN

the idiom of a “multiculturalism” that tolerates difference—the “stranger

within”—so long as they do not challenge existing relations of power and the
goals of rationalization. In the present climate of “war against terror,” dis-
crepant and counter-hegemonic ways of being are now thought of as inimical
to good order and thus to be countered by a policy of total surveillance and, at
the limit, “zero tolerance.”
One should bear in mind that the model of the “imagined community,”
constituted in relation to print technology and modern governance, already
made invisible, or marginalized the presence of non-Western people in
Europe, but also the fact that cities everywhere have been, for a long time, the
sites of transcultural exchanges amongst migrant populations. This is particu-
larly true of imperial centres, for instance Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad,
London. The tendency to see cultural and identity difference as a problem
rather than as a normal feature of the urban cultural milieu is an aspect of this
occidentalist epistemology. I am arguing that in order to move away from the
older framework of analysis, theory today must recognise two related prob-
lematics: on the one hand, the complex interrelations between mobility and
settlement, uprootedness and groundedness, being and territory (Ahmed 2003),
and on the other hand, the recognition that the intertwining and heterogeneity
of cultures is far more endemic and of longer duration than many analyses of
diaspora, hybridity, multiculturalism, migrancy recognise (Said 1993). Cross-
cultural and transcultural encounters and exchanges are precisely the mecha-
nisms whereby cultures change, although conflict often attends these encoun-
ters, as in the case of invasion and conquest, or in the case of exclusion.
In other words, cultures are inescapably polyglot. This is even clearer to-
day because the interpenetration of the global and the local at all levels means
that the material and the virtual, roots and routes, are now correlated in terms
of different spatialisations and temporalities constituted in relation to new
technologies of communication and travel, new spatial technologies, and,
alongside this everyday reality, in terms of new imaginaries that pluralise be-
longing in quite new ways (Sassen, 1999; Ong 2003; Shohat 1999).
It is worth bearing in mind too that the process of migration and settle-
ment, whilst it is now differently grounded by reference to territorialization,
nevertheless follows a pattern of deterritorialization and reterritorialization,
which is driven by a search for settlement and ontological security that has
long roots into the emergence of forms of sociality, as Deleuze and Guattari
(1988) have argued. This perspective brings into view the fact that the onto-
logical and the affective dimensions of being-in-the-world are correlated in
the everyday. At the theoretical level, an agenda around diaspora and mi-
grancy has surfaced in the wake of these developments that itself needs to be
rethought in terms of the longue duree, going beyond the parameters of the
hegemonic discourse of modernity. A displacement is therefore needed at the

44
 THE CITY AS ASSEMBLAGE

level of theory with implications for policy, and for the invention of new ap-
paratuses that would support the new forms of diasporic cosmopolitan sociali-
ties that are appearing in cities across the world.
This displacement shifts the emphasis onto the importance of spatiality
and temporality, namely, geography, architecture, and place, considered in
terms of the imbrication of memory and history in the objects and environ-
ments that constitute the lifeworld of people and the investments that one
makes in the material world. The spatio-temporal location of identity and sub-
jectivity in regimes and “realms/lieux” of memory (Nora 1984–93), draws
attention to the presence of the past in the present and the co-existence of the
different rhythms and temporalities that inscribe existential belonging in the
everyday (Lefebvre 2003). Such lifeworlds function as the habitus in relation
to which people make sense of their lives. The constitution of such worlds and
the constitution of social imaginaries and identity are correlated processes,
that is to say, it is not possible to analyse the one without making visible the
effects of the other processes.
Another displacement relates to the point of view of governmentality as
elaborated in the work of Foucault, and thus the focus on the apparatuses and
knowledges that constitute norms, authorise specific forms of power, and
generate the technologies of the social concerned with forming, disciplining,
and regulating populations (Foucault 1979). Contemporary conditions in the
emergent megacity lead one to question the ability of state-based disciplinary
regimes of power/knowledge to constitute socialities that conform to the
norms it seeks to determine. The question that comes to mind is whether the
co-presence of global and local effects—regarding social imaginaries and new
identities—poses a fundamental challenge for state-based interventionary
programmes. It can be argued that the model of governance premised on ho-
mogenous populations and temporality and on territorial exclusivity—with its
own assumptions and myths or imaginaries about national and ethnic authen-
ticity, cultural value, administrative efficiency, the space of belonging, the
norms of the normal, and so on—is obliged to impose ways of being and tech-
nologies of control that intensify conflict. The attempt in France in 2004 to
use legislation to impose conformity to norms, as in the case of the wearing of
the veil in school, has demonstrated the problems with such local mechanisms
when dealing with processes that respond to geo-political and geo-cultural
forces.
It should be noted that there exists a different discourse about the urban
lifeworld for which flux and mobility, the evanescent, and the indeterminate
are intrinsic features of modernity, intensified in the pleasures and disloca-
tions that make the city the site of transient populations and speedy lives, as
expressed in Benjamin’s (1999) work. This view accords with the standpoint
of assemblage that I will develop later. It is important to point out too that

45
COUZE VENN

against this celebration of a certain “nomadism” and of particular creative and

radical groups, one must remember the insecurities and hardships of those,
mostly the poor, whose displacement is driven by the exigencies of survival in
a world constantly transformed by forces outside their control. These forces
operate across the new “contact zones” and “scapes” that are in fact correlated
according to capitalist calculations and forms of ownership. Today, all these
pressures and tendencies make the city a place of stabilities and instabilities,
of de- and re-territorializations that play out a diversity of ends. This means
that the analysis of the culture of cities must foreground the standpoint of its
diasporic configuration and the interpenetration of the global and the local at
all levels of social reality, challenging the dichotomies of here and there
(Cairns 2004).

The megacity as new problematic

Let me note two research projects that take account of the problematizations
that I have summarised in addressing the question of the city today. Bishop,
Phillips, and Yeo (2003) explore the neglected interface between urban stud-
ies and development studies, proposing a new approach that brings into view
features of urban realities that have not been adequately recognized because
of the way disciplinary inscription has so far cut up the world. A salient fea-
ture is the fact that multiple temporalities co-exist within the urban space,
temporalities that are colonial, postcolonial and geopolitical, more intensely
experienced now, but present in other periods too, as postcolonial studies has
shown regarding the invisible presence of non-white populations in the met-
ropolitan cities of Europe in imperial times (Fryer 1985). The authors argue
that global urbanism and postcolonialism are concomitant phenomena, shaped
by interdependencies that are obscured by the conceptual framework which
divides the colonial, the postcolonial, the cold-war and post-cold-war into a
series of distinct periods succeeding each other. They point to the hybrid and
mobile character of the identities that co-habit the urban space, a plural spati-
ality which is punctuated by different rhythms of existence and by the diver-
sity of experience and social relations that are lived in it (Pile/Thrift 1995;
Yuval-Davis/Werbner 1999; Lefebvre 2004; Grosz 2001).
The work of Koolhaas (2002) and others (Chung et. al 2002; Simone
2001; Sassen 2001), with their focus on the postcolonial city and the megac-
ity, adds concrete support for the (Lefebvrian) view about co-habiting spati-
alities and temporalities, detecting the process in the discrepant urban life-
worlds that are theorised in terms of dysfunction or failure from the point of
view of a western instrumental modernity or occidentalism. Looking at Lagos
as exemplar, Koolhaus notes that what appears to be signs of decay and fail-

46
 THE CITY AS ASSEMBLAGE

ure turns out to be complex systems of survival operating through recycling,

trading, and networks of mutual exchange and relations. These enact sophisti-
cated strategies for sustaining non-“Western” forms of existence for popula-
tions of millions of people in poorly resourced environments. Such activities
are what conventional theory categorises as “informal,” that is, as elements of
the “black” or shadow economy that escape the regulatory and disciplinary
gaze of state agencies. Such activities exist to a degree in all cities anyway,
for instance in favelas, bidonvilles, ghettos, and so on. They are the object of
a biopolitics aimed at either containment or rehabilitation. What is clear is
that postcolonial cities are set to increase in size and number globally—from
Hong Kong to Shanghai, to Mexico City to Delhi—and that existing forms of
governance cannot control these so-called dysfunctional areas that are not just
by-products of displacements occurring both transnationally and from the ru-
ral to the urban (for instance already 40 % of the African population live in
urban areas): they are constituent elements of postmodern urbanism and
global capitalism. What is equally clear is that the effects of geopolitical
power and transnational corporate activities reproduce inequalities at both the
local and global levels, so that the analysis of the urban must be informed by
wider theoretical perspectives developed in dissident and counter-hegemonic
theorizations of the global, as in some postcolonial and cultural theory
(Hardt/Negri 2000; Sassen 1999).
I would like to point to another perspective that throws additional light on
the processes that sustain spatio-temporally plural and diasporic environ-
ments. It proceeds from the view that the lifeworld as living space is a terri-
tory appropriated by marking it in some way with marks that are culturally
significant, that is, marks that constitute and reconstitute particular imaginar-
ies. This activity, evidenced in the everyday in the décor and style of houses
and buildings, or indeed in graffiti, and, generally, in the translation of place
through their reiteration (their repetition with-and-in difference) in a new spa-
tiality—say, China Town in Los Angeles, or Little India in Singapore, New
England in the New World—is a form of memorialisation and socialisation of
living space. It is a signifying practice that inscribes the material world with
an affective economy and with historicity, so that it can be performatively
appropriated as living space conceptualised in terms of such signifying prac-
tice. The fact that many people cannot appropriate the place they inhabit be-
cause of power relations that make them invisible or subaltern—say, women
in some circumstances, the incapacitated, the elderly, the refugee, the “out-
sider” (Grosz 2001)—needs to be stressed when one thinks about the actuali-
zation of virtual spaces, the architecture of living space as well as attempts to
intervene in these situations.
The reference to historicity is meant to bring into view the continuities as
well as the shifts at the level of the imaginary when one considers displace-

47
COUZE VENN

ment and settlement, de- and re-territorializations, in terms of the identities

and diasporic socialities that inhabit urban places. For one thing, it makes
visible what the discourse of modern governmentality makes invisible,
namely, the fact that the urban space has been plural and diasporic for a much
longer period than it acknowledges. Besides, it enables one to interrogate the
plurality of spaces by reference to the effects of power at the level of subjec-
tivity and culture. Issues about assimilation and multiculturalism must be lo-
cated within this perspective, so that the remaking of identities and communi-
ties can be understood as strategic responses to perceived power relations,
taking the form of accommodation, or resistance, or coping strategies, or crea-
tive artistic practice (Enwesor 2002). A question about agency surfaces here
that would require more space to develop than I have in the context of this
paper.

The problematic of assemblage

In the rest of the paper, I would like to sketch a different analytical apparatus
for addressing the range of issues I have noted, organised around the concept
of assemblage. This concept has emerged as one of a series of new concepts,
alongside those of complexity, chaos, indeterminacy, fractals, string, turbu-
lence, flow, multiplicity, emergence, poiesis, and so on, that now form the
theoretical vocabulary for addressing the problem of determination and struc-
ture, of process and change, and of stability and instability regarding social
phenomena. As with the previous set of concepts in the social sciences, nota-
bly the notion of structure, they derive from developments in the natural sci-
ences and mathematics. Their introduction signals an important shift at the
level of theorisation and methodology, opening analysis to the recognition of
the complexity of cultural, social as well as “natural” phenomena, for instance
concerning sociality, the organism, mind, and culturally plural spaces.
Structure in conventional paradigms in the natural and social sciences
grounds causal determination within a logic of stability and linear causality. It
is a central epistemological element in the work of the grand theorists of so-
cial science such as from Marx to Parsons. The notion of discrete and no-
mological determination, which positivism and some forms of structuralism
support, has clear pay-offs from the point of view of categorising and predict-
ing social phenomena, and thus for the possibility of intervention and rational
governance. However, the limitations of approaches based on this notion of
determination have been demonstrated in their failure to account adequately
for the dynamics of change, resistance, agency, mobility, the event, the irrup-
tion of the unexpected or unpredictable, that is, complexity. The limitations
relate also to their inadequacy from the point of view of co-relating phenom-

48
 THE CITY AS ASSEMBLAGE

ena across different fields, for example between the psychic and the social,
the affective and the cognitive, and between matter and form. The problem for
theory is that of re-thinking structure as well as multiplicity and indetermi-
nacy within the same theoretical framework.

The concept of assemblage has appeared in the wake of questions about the
relationship of structural determination to indeterminacy and emergence. In
the recent literature it is mostly associated with the work of Deleuze and
Guattari and clearly explained in Delanda (2002). One can also retrace its
emergence by reference to developments in the physics of small particles, in
topology, in molecular biology and generally in the interface between the
theorisation of emergence and becoming (say in ontogeny and phylogeny),
adaptation or autopoiesis and cybernetic systems (Maturana/Varela 1980),
and post-structuralist mathematics. They all emphasise adaptivity rather than
fixity or essence, the formal properties of the system rather than the specific
instance, the spatio-temporal dimension rather than quantities, the relational,
that is, co-articulation and compossibility, rather than linear and discrete de-
termination, the multilinear temporality of processes such that emergence and
irreversibility are brought to the fore (Prigogine/Stengers 1984).
In the light of the foregoing, assemblage can be seen as a relay concept,
linking the problematic of structure with that of change and far-from-
equilibrium systems. It focuses on process and on the dynamic character of
the inter-relationships between the heterogeneous elements of the phenome-
non. It recognises both structurizing and indeterminate effects, that is, both
flow and turbulence, produced in the interaction of open systems. It points to
complex becomings and multiple determinations (Ong/Collier 2004). It is
sensitive to time and temporality in the emergence and mutation of the phe-
nomenon; it thus directs attention to the longue duree. Whilst Deleuze and
Guattari (1988) suggest desiring machines as exemplar, one could instead re-
fer to weather formation and the genome, or for that matter, to the formation
of identity and diasporic cultures, that is, to the (post-Deleuzian) question of
emergence and becoming generally.
In relation to the latter, one must point to the fact that the translation of
cultures through the diasporic displacement of people occurs mostly in urban
environments. Cities are already technological and social assemblages, oper-
ating in the form of coordinated networks of sub-systems relating to build-
ings, transport networks, commodity exchange, productive practices, appara-
tuses of training, regulation and communication, artistic practices, and so on.
All these sub-systems are open systems, coherent in terms of their own rules
and routines and flows, yet open to the effects of contiguous systems, that is
to say, they are dynamic, complex, processual, and autopoietic in their opera-

49
COUZE VENN

tion. Change and turbulence in one part of the assemblage has effects for the
other parts, often with indeterminate consequences.
The conceptualisation of the city as assemblage has the advantage of ena-
bling theory to recognise the degrees of freedom that enable the urban spatial-
ity to adapt to change; another advantage is the ability to envisage disequilib-
rium as normal. Contemporary patterns of migrancy and settlement enable
one to see this process of mutation in action, for example, in the case of the
effects of mass migration such as Turks to some German cities. Such move-
ments appear as event, that is, as an irruption that results in the emergence of
innovation through adaptation, graft, invention, the mobilisation of potential
capacities, new combinations, and changes in configuration.
In the idiom of assemblage, emergence is processual, it occurs according
to a pragmatics of becoming. With regard to diaspora, one could take the case
of the category of music called “urban,” which has developed out of particular
combinations of hip-hop, rock, jazz, indie and other musical forms from
around the world, recombined to express the specificity of urban living in dif-
ferent locales, using new technologies of music production. This music be-
longs to the complex set of signifying practices that inscribe and shape dias-
poric identity. Its meaning and effects need to be located in relation to the
range of teletechnologies that now form or mediate contemporary social
imaginaries. Their functioning relates, on the one hand, to their imbrication in
global corporate capitalism and in strategies of subjectification and subjec-
tion, and, on the other hand, to their deployment as the visible and audible
technics for establishing and supporting networks of social relations operating
transculturally to sustain plural belongings and habitations. Teletechnologies,
as a constitutive element of contemporary cultures, sustain cultural spaces
where both virtual and real co-habit, a space open both to mediatised capital-
ism and to “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999) and alternative becomings. It is
clear that the recognition of the centrality of migration and diasporas for an
understanding of spatiality and culture, together with the standpoint of cul-
tures as unavoidably intertwined and recombinant, entails a break with the
epistemological framework that legitimates strategies of normalization, as-
similation, exclusion and enfortressement in urban and national spaces, and
the power relations played out through them.

I wish to thank Rob Shields, Ryan Bishop, and John Phillips for their invalu-
able comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

50
 THE CITY AS ASSEMBLAGE

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Rem apping the Geopo lit ic s o f Terror:
Uncann y Urb an Sp a ce s in Si ngapore

LISA LAW

This paper considers urban conflicts as embedded in a range of geopolitical

scales. Using post-9/11 Singapore as a case study, it is argued that the barri-
cading of spaces deemed vulnerable to terrorist attack summons layers of his-
torical division, connection, and affiliation—but these do not always include
Washington at their geopolitical centre. Instead, urban tensions in Singapore
are shaped by the uncanny return of the ghostly past, raising questions about
belonging in the multicultural state.

On 28 November 2002, a text message threatening a bomb explosion in the

expatriate enclave of Holland Village1 caused widespread apprehension
across Singapore. According to police, who isolated the source of the message
within days, a 20-year-old man had initiated the panic. The young man’s sis-
ter had apparently overheard a conversation about the discovery of a bomb
amongst a group of expatriates in a Holland Village restaurant. She reported
the conversation to her brother, who then circulated a text message warning
his immediate friends. Given the seriousness of the message, and the techno-
logical ease of spreading the rumour, it circulated widely—eventually to hun-
dreds of people. When a nearby school alerted police after receiving it, a news
release was issued warning against such acts. The release found fear in a

1 Holland Village was established sometime between the late 1930s and 1945 as a
military village and served the recreational needs of British soldiers and their
families (Chang 1995). When the British repatriated thousands of personnel be-
tween 1971 and 1976, it had already become a mainstay for Singaporeans and a
new expatriate population.

53
LISA LAW

community still reeling from the Bali blasts of a month earlier, and from gov-
ernment allegations that the Jemaah Islamiyah—an allegedly Al-Qaeda-linked
organization with networks across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the
Philippines—had been targeting key sites across Singapore for terrorist activi-
ties. Despite knowledge that the young man had been mistaken, by the end of
the month barricades had been put up along two streets in the area, which
were closed to traffic from 6:30pm to 4:00am daily (Figure 1). As the months
passed, Holland Village became a model for how to protect other sites “catering
to Westerners,” such as entertainment districts and hotels.

Figure 1: Barricading of the streets in Holland Village (Photo: © Lisa Law)

Did the bomb hoax represent a collective fear of the possible return of vio-
lence to the streets of Singapore? Was it possible that Muslim radicals would
attack Western-oriented entertainment districts in capitalist Singapore that had
also pledged support for America’s war on terrorism? In a government White
Paper released during 2003, details of potential terrorist activities in Singa-
pore were elaborated (Republic of Singapore, 2003). According to “official
sources2,” the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) intended to assault a series of American-

2 I use this term cautiously as it is difficult to have confidence in official sources when
much of their information is obtained from subjects in detention. For an excellent
review of how sources have been cited in academic and related debate, cf. Hamilton-
Hart (2005). She argues that “fantasy” and “myopia” characterize much of the field
of terrorism studies, and that certain fantasies about Southeast Asian terrorism are
based on “uncertain conjecture posing as reliable information” (p. 304).

54
 REMAPPING THE GEOPOLITICS OF TERROR

related interests across the island, including the American, Israeli, and British
embassies, commercial buildings housing American companies, and a shuttle
bus service used to ferry American military personnel to the Sembawang na-
val base. The remaining sites focused on Singapore state interests, and in-
cluded the mass rapid transit system, Changi International Airport, the Minis-
try and Defence building, and the highly politicized water pipeline between
Malaysia and Singapore. By September 2002, the government had arrested 31
persons suspected of being connected to the JI; more would be detained under
the Internal Security Act, or placed under restriction orders (National Security
Coordination Centre 2004). Their confessions, while in detention, unsurpris-
ingly revealed links to the JI. Detainees also expressed commitment to a vi-
sion of Daulah Islamiyah Nusantara (an Islamic state or archipelago) stretch-
ing from Indonesia to Thailand and the Philippines, and into which Singapore
would ultimately be absorbed.
Holland Village was not mentioned as a potential site of terrorist interest,
although the area had recently been touted in the popular press as a “little Bo-
hemia” where lifestyles outside the usual structures of Singaporean society
could flourish. Fear of its bombing reflected many ongoing concerns, includ-
ing a perceived Westernization of Singapore and the erosion of “Asian Val-
ues.” Asian Values are a geographically and culturally specific state-spon-
sored ideology, where the family, community, and broader social order are
privileged over individual liberty (Wee 1999). This ideology both enables a
distinctive sense of Asian-ness in the postcolonial period, while at the same
time decentring the role of religion in a multicultural state. Holland Village
represented a site where Asian Values might be compromised, though with
potentially contaminating effects. It was for this reason that an entertainment
district not specifically targeted for terrorist attack, and where only hearsay
fueled fears of danger, became a site of intervention and potential urban con-
flict.
The last time bombs exploded in Singapore was during the Indonesian
Confrontation, or Konfrontasi, in the 1960s. During this time, Indonesian
radicals infiltrated the streets of Singapore (then part of Malaysia), setting off
bombs to generate alarm and stir up latent racial tension. The Confrontation
was Indonesian President Sukarno’s initiative to disrupt the new state of Ma-
laysia, which was being crafted out of the remains of the colonial epoch.
Many Indonesian leaders regarded the new state as a front for continued Brit-
ish presence in the region and a neo-imperialist plot to expand Malaysia’s
borders to include northern Borneo. But President Macapagal of the Philippi-
nes and President Sukarno of Indonesia, each conceiving Borneo as belonging
to their own territories, had a different vision of a less rigid association of
states across the Malay archipelago, which was detailed but never realized in
the Manila Accord of 1963. That region was to be called Maphilindo—an

55
LISA LAW

amalgam of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia—and would symbolize

the development of a self-reliant, free, and independent Malay region in
Southeast Asia. Maphilindo was doomed to failure, however, as its concep-
tion was also embedded in a larger struggle between the superpowers of Brit-
ain (Malaysia), America (Philippines), and China (Indonesia). These visions
of an allied archipelago would recede for the next decades as the post-colonial
boundaries of Southeast Asia took shape.
The recent wave of terrorist detentions, threats of bombings, and dreams
of a pan-Islamic state all bear an uncanny resemblance to this tumultuous pe-
riod of post-colonial history. In 2002, Indonesian President Megawati and
Philippine President Arroyo were both in power (and were the daughters of
Sukarno and Macapagal, respectively). A modified and more explicitly Is-
lamic version of Maphilindo was being articulated in fresh forms. Suspected
terrorists were being detained under Internal Security Acts created during the
Cold War to detain what were then understood as communist terrorists, and
renewed American interest in the region saw the return of troops in the
Philippines and a hasty thawing of relations with Malaysia. This appeared to
be an uncanny era in Southeast Asian history: Was America’s war on terror-
ism similar to its earlier war on communism, and thus another imperial pro-
ject in the region? Or is this resemblance uncanny, in Freud’s (1919) more
particular sense, in that these eras inhabit each other in recognizable and for-
eign ways?
The “uncanny,” according to Freud (1919), is resistant to definition, but
represents a liminal state between what is familiar (heimlich) and unfamiliar
(unheimlich)—an unstable moment that problematises order. What makes the
uncanny unique is not that something familiar suddenly becomes strange,
however; it is the way in which the two terms inhabit each other, making one
feel “at home” and “unhomely” simultaneously. Because this produces a
sense of being involuntarily repetitious, it can also be frightening. Mike Davis
(2001), for example, draws on the uncanny to explain the American experi-
ence of 9/11, where the threat of global terrorism had been long dreamt about
and imagined in Hollywood action films. Images of terrorism, death, and de-
struction recognizable to American audiences returned to the small screen in
disturbingly unfamiliar ways—bringing fear to the streets of American cities.
The uncanny also helps explain the experience of terrorism in Southeast Asia,
where the contours of being “in place” and “out of place” became unsettled
after 9/11. The resurgent vision of an Islamic archipelago introduced old
questions of unity and disconnection across postcolonial nation-states, as well
as new questions about the role of transnationalism in constructing pan-
Islamic identities. These issues of national boundaries and geographies of
ethnic and religious identity receded somewhat with the demise of Maphil-
indo—much as they did when advocated by the Darul Islam during anti-

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 REMAPPING THE GEOPOLITICS OF TERROR

colonial struggles in the 1940s. Their return in familiar/unfamiliar ways raised

specific issues for multicultural, but nevertheless Chinese-dominant, Singa-
pore at a variety of scales. Was Singapore in or out of place in a Muslim ar-
chipelago? Could the postcolonial map of Southeast Asia be redrawn by Mus-
lim radicals? Despite decades of official multicultural policy, did Singaporean
Muslims identify with the nation or with a pan-Islamic identity? Did Holland
Village represent a site where “Asian” and “Islamic” values were in conflict?
Perhaps this moment better represents what Gelder and Jacobs (1998)
have characterized as the “postcolonial uncanny,” in that it articulates the un-
easy place of the sacred in the postcolonial nation-state. Gelder and Jacobs’
(1998) analysis of Australian Aboriginal land claims enhances our under-
standing of the uncanny, where notions of belonging/not belonging and “sa-
credness-in-the-midst-of-modernity” help explain some of the tensions pro-
duced in the postcolonial moment. Their work parallels Freud’s own concern
with one’s sense of place in a modern world, and examines uncanny experi-
ences arising from the return of spiritual beliefs in the modern, Australian na-
tion-state. Freud himself conceded that the latter were much more frequent,
and that many people experience uncanny “feeling[s] in the highest degree in
relation to death and dead bodies, [and] to the return of […] spirits and
ghosts” (in Gordon 1997:51). The uncanny thus represents a “quality” of feel-
ing, an unsettling recurrence, and, as Gordon (1997:50) suggests, these are
often haunting experiences. In Australia it is the return of the ghostly past—
i.e. an Aboriginal Australia constructed out of sacred sites—that profoundly
unsettles who is “in place” and “out of place” in the contemporary nation.
Gelder and Jacobs examine how this remapping of national space overwrites
postcolonial boundaries, producing tensions at local, regional, and national
scales.
Although Singapore and Australia are very different sites with different
issues and colonial histories, the “postcolonial uncanny” helps explain some
of the tensions in post-9/11 Southeast Asia. For it is the possibility of a Malay
Muslim geopolitical entity, with weighty historical roots, that haunts post-
colonial Singapore. This is made all the more real by fragmentation in Indo-
nesia, where there are struggles for greater autonomy in regions such as Aceh
and Irian Jaya, and by separatist movements in Thailand and the Philippines.
Fears about regional association have been apparent since the Confrontation
and Sino-Malay racial riots in the 1960s, which were essentially struggles
over the position of Malays (who are still unable to hold sensitive positions in
the military, as it is thought their loyalty might be “compromised” in regional
disputes). The war on terror has given these fears renewed veracity through
media commentary (Figure 2), government reports of the JI’s regional vision
(Republic of Singapore 2003), and policy pronouncements that have created
Inter-Racial Confidence Circles to encourage inter-communal harmony (Goh

57
LISA LAW

2002). Since independence, the state has devoted enormous political effort to
create a multicultural Singapore, whose origins are professed to be rooted in
its discovery by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. Yet in Malay folklore, Singa-
pore was founded in the 14th century by Sang Nila Utama, a Prince of super-
natural origins (Miksic and Low 2004). The ruins of the Prince’s palace,
where his descendants resided until the beginning of this century, have been
renovated and made into a museum celebrating Singapore’s varied ancestry.
In a controversial essay about race relations, Alfian bin Sa’at (2002:386) sug-
gests that the museum erases this royal history, encouraging Malay Singapor-
eans to surrender their memories for the benefit of racial harmony.

Figure 2: Jemaah Islamiyah in the media 3

It is the return of this spectre—a Malay world with its own history, geogra-
phy, and “values”—that is more frightening than the fear of violence itself. It
unsettles the boundaries of postcolonial states, raising uncertainties about
multicultural coexistence and the place of Singapore’s capitalist modernity in
Muslim Southeast Asia. In this sense, fears about a Holland Village bombing
are as much about a reworked regional vision as they are about the presence
of Western expatriates. The remainder of this paper thus chronicles the unset-

3 This photo appeared with an article titled “JI Reloaded: Could it happen?” in The
Straits Times, 13 December 2003. It depicts Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader
of the JI, together with Singaporeans arrested under the Internal Security Act
(many photos are repeated). The article expresses the resilience of the network
and how “it will try to penetrate Singapore again … as its goals are long term …
terrorists are eminently patient creatures.”

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 REMAPPING THE GEOPOLITICS OF TERROR

tling of now established geopolitical entities, as regional knowledge is crucial

to understand the barricading of a space not explicitly deemed vulnerable to
terrorist attack. First, I explore the “enduring fiction” of Southeast Asia, plac-
ing its coherence within a broader context of colonial and imperial aspiration.
I examine the uncanny resemblances between the Cold War and the post-9/11
moment, charting the different ways Southeast Asia has been “produced” as a
region since the end of WWII. While parallels can be drawn between con-
structions of the region as “potentially communist” and “radically Islamic,”
Washington’s war on terrorism is not really a familiar imperial project in the
region. Moving away from Anglocentric versions of Southeast Asia, I then
consider broader questions about transnational connections and the hybridity
of Southeast Asian capitalisms to illuminate recent events. The resurgent vi-
sion of a pan-Islamic archipelago represents one political alternative in a re-
gion experimenting with Christian, Islamic, and Confucian traditions. Engag-
ing different regional visions helps explain a more complex global juncture,
rather than an era over-determined by the Bush doctrine. It also helps illumi-
nate the encounter with terrorism in the region, and the spectres haunting ur-
ban spaces.

The enduring fiction of Southeast Asia

The attacks on America on 9/11, and the subsequent war with Afghanistan,
ushered in a new era of terrorist threat in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere. Al-
though Southeast Asian nations universally condemned the horror of 9/11,
and expressed this conviction by joining the global campaign against terror-
ism, American suspicions that the region might become the new “theatre” of
transnational terrorist activities were pervasive. Surveillance and intelligence
activities initially revealed that the JI had been developing military and eco-
nomic links with Al-Qaeda since the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s. Moreo-
ver, the JI was alleged to have been planning attacks on American interests in
places like Singapore, as well as visioning a pan-Islamic state. Before 9/11,
terrorist activities had largely been homegrown, religion-based sectarian con-
flicts directed towards gaining autonomy or independence. Most of these
movements found sustenance in the economic and political marginalization of
large segments of the population. The discovery of plans to attack the US em-
bassy and other American interests in Singapore, when combined with the
shock of the Bali bombings in Indonesia, suggested that new tactics involving
Western interests and civilian casualties were being incorporated into the JI
agenda. Furthermore, the JI were not the usual suspects: their members, al-
though small in number, were from the educated middle classes.

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LISA LAW

The unfolding of world events post-9/11 initiated a renewed American in-

terest in the region, heralded by some as the “second front” in Washington’s
war on terrorism. The Bush administration sent several hundred troops to the
Philippines, softened relations with Malaysia, and some pundits declared In-
donesia the next Afghanistan. Southeast Asia is home to the world’s most
populous Muslim country, Indonesia, the two Muslim-majority states of Ma-
laysia and Brunei, as well as nations, such as Singapore, Thailand, and the
Philippines, that have significant Muslim minorities. Although the threat of
radical Islam has been evident in Indonesia since President Suharto’s fall in
1998, the suggestion of a more wide-ranging peril is difficult to disentangle
from America’s frenzied response to the tragedy of 9/11. Ethnic and religious
diversity, comparatively democratic polities, the lack of pan-regional con-
stituencies for radical Islam, and the JI’s own limited ties to other broad-based
Islamic groups, have all thwarted the development of a fundamentalist hegem-
ony by any one group in the region (Gershman 2002; Hamilton-Hart 2005).
Nevertheless, Southeast Asia emerged in the American geopolitical imagina-
tion as a volatile and potentially dangerous Muslim territory in the post-9/11
moment. States such as Singapore, fearing the economic repercussions of not
responding to this image, initiated their own anti-terrorist campaigns.
American fears of terrorism, and suspicion of Muslim activities, are remi-
niscent of the Cold War “domino theory” that led to decades of American in-
volvement in the region. The installation of military bases, the propping up of
military dictatorships, and the war in Vietnam were all justified in the name of
preventing communism from spreading south, domino style, to nations such
as Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Communist obsessions helped to shape
establishment of ASEAN in 1967, for example, which essentially divided up
Southeast Asia into “communist” Indochina, “socialist” Burma, and “capitalist”
ASEAN nations (Emmerson 1984). The latter, perhaps unsurprisingly, were
“beneficiaries” of American military and economic assistance. In any case,
Southeast Asia emerged more in relation to Anglo-American power and inter-
ests during and after WWII than to some indigenously defined and experi-
enced regionalism. The region, produced through economic and military ac-
tivities, was made all the more real and legitimized through area studies re-
search that undertook projects on cultures, economies, and politics in largely
national terms.
As the communist threat subsided there was a drastic change in the way
the US engaged with nations in the region. American policies shifted from
“compulsory” to “selective” engagement, and interests shifted to sites that were
more consistent with neo-liberal economic development (cf. Bishop et al.
2003: 26). Aid and investment became more linked to mutually beneficial
economic arrangements, and the American military bases in the Philippines
withdrew. Tiger economies, with their networked nodes of capital, produc-

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 REMAPPING THE GEOPOLITICS OF TERROR

tion, and labour, garnered much more attention than the fledgling economies
of countries such as Cambodia, which lapsed into civil war. But the 1990s
also saw ASEAN accept Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar as mem-
bers, and over the past decade have placed emphasis on regional economic
and political cooperation both in the region and beyond. In a post-Cold War
Southeast Asia that has grown more confident about East Asian futures, it
would be difficult for America’s desire to contain radical Islam to be realized
in ways commensurate to its Cold War dominance. Although economic and
military cooperation remain important to countries such as Singapore and the
Philippines, and Southeast Asian nations do aim to present themselves as re-
sponding to the threat of terrorism for economic gain, reducing these exam-
ples to exemplify American hegemony in Southeast Asia is to downplay the
sovereignty of local agendas and politics. It also serves to equate America’s
dominance in one arena with dominance in all spheres.
It is difficult to point to the limits of thinking in terms of American domi-
nance in Southeast Asia without feeling somewhat uncomfortable. America’s
aggression in the Middle East seems to have revived the terminology of
“imperialism” and “empire,” and some suggest that recent events mark a mo-
ment in the re-territorialization of a dominant American capitalism (Smith
2001). Prior to 9/11 Southeast Asian nations would have more easily been de-
picted as negotiating relations with the US in a post-imperial, globalist world
composed of more than one centre of power, and where events in Beijing,
Tokyo, and Singapore were just as significant as those in Washington. Multi-
lateral organizations such as APEC, transnational business networks, and the
growth in intra-Asian cultural and intellectual traffic could have been mar-
shalled to provide evidence of this claim. Since 9/11, however, states in the
region have been anxiously looking at America in anticipation of an altered
geopolitical map. Arrests have been made, trials are underway, and public
protest has been carefully managed. Yet an emphasis on American dominance
fails to appreciate the more subtle meanings that permeate a range of embed-
ded scales—from urban spaces to the nation-state and region.

Re-mapping the Southeast Asian archipelago

It is with these ideas in mind that I return to different conceptions of South-

east Asia, ones that foreground different histories and imperatives, and place
urban spaces within historical contexts that help explain Singapore’s encoun-
ter with terrorism. This approach articulates the radical questioning of the
ways area studies can now be conceived, given a range of critiques that have
exposed the complicity of area studies with colonial, imperial, military, eco-
nomic, or other ideological interests. Willem van Schendel (2002), for exam-

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LISA LAW

ple, stresses the limits to understanding Southeast Asia as a meaningful term,

as this presupposes stable and bounded states. His invented region of Zomia,
formed at the convergence of Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia, did
not make the world geopolitical map after WWII “because it lacked strong
centres of state formation, was politically ambiguous, and did not command
political clout” (2002: 647). Knowledge about the region thus fell into de-
cline, creating geographies of ignorance. Van Schendel argues that attention
to borderlands can be used to reinvigorate area studies, and to “imagine other
spatial configurations, such as cross-cutting areas, the worldwide honeycomb
of borderlands, or the process geographies of transnational flows” (2002:
647). In other words, different geographical networks that combine political,
economic, and cultural flows that fall outside bounded nation-states offer new
ways to imagine “areas.” The resurgent vision of a pan-Islamic archipelago is
one cross-cutting configuration.
Although reports of the history of the JI offer a variety of perspectives, it
is generally alleged that the roots of the organization can be traced back to
Darul Islam struggles against Dutch colonial rule in the 1940s (Republic of
Singapore 2003, International Crisis Group 2002a, 2002b; Desker 2003). The
Darul Islam itself was preceded by various tumultuous periods in Indonesian
history, and anterior intellectual movements that had likewise struggled with
ideas of Islamic nationhood (Laffan 2002). After Indonesia gained independ-
ence in 1949, the Darul Islam continued the struggle for the establishment of
an Islamic state, staging a number of rebellions in the 1950s. In the 1970s and
1980s, the grouping gained new membership and became known as the JI. In
the late 1970s, the Iranian Revolution and the availability of Indonesian trans-
lations of Middle Eastern writings on political Islam were stimulating unrest.
In the 1980s, some JI members travelled to Afghanistan to solicit financial
support for their activities and to acquire new tactics to fight the Indonesian
state. An inner core of the network—including its spiritual leader Abu Bakar
Bashir—also fled to Malaysia in the mid-1980s to avoid arrest by Suharto’s
secular dictatorship. This latter group did not return to Indonesia until the fall
of the regime in 1998, but in exile had formed networks with Malaysians that
are now portrayed as aiding in the planning attacks on targets in Singapore.
This condensed history highlights the problems with assuming that South-
east Asia can be framed in a linear trajectory that details its various engage-
ments with colonialism, postcolonialism, the Cold War, and post-Cold War
neoliberalism. It is precisely this narrative that constructs Southeast Asia as a
region, making the war on terrorism difficult to understand locally, as it does
not contextualize historical links to the Middle East—links that have been
ongoing for centuries and are responsible for bringing Islam to the region—
nor does it explain cross-cutting relations across the archipelago that existed
prior to, within, and beyond the colonial period. While analyses of terrorism

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 REMAPPING THE GEOPOLITICS OF TERROR

do scrutinize these connections, they are not historicized and/or are repre-
sented in the essentialist language of “terrorist cells.” In so doing, these repre-
sentations are able to eschew “significant challenges to the political and intel-
lectual hegemonies of the West […] located in the Middle and Far East”
(Chan/Mandaville 2003: 3). Foregrounding these connections, and placing
them within a context of a volatile geopolitical order, raises different ques-
tions about terrorism and its relation to Islamic movements.
As Southeast Asian nations struggle to find an identity and place in a post-
colonial, post-Cold War globalist order, there are few examples of Islamic
states that have brought peace and prosperity to their populations. It is thus
important to place recent regional tensions within a context of the success of
those nations that have developed and adopted Confucian capitalism, such as
Singapore, reformulating prior models of economic development in hybrid
ways that combine capital with the nation-state within a general framework of
Asian values. Moreover, in a world guided by Christian and Confucian capi-
talist modernities, Muslim Southeast Asia has proposed “moderate Islam,” a
secular state embracing and inculcating Muslim values. This was most devel-
oped in Malaysia under Prime Minister Mahathir’s leadership, and can be
placed within the broader project of re-imagining how Islam’s declined civili-
zation might be reconstructed. Indeed, the war on terror might do well to con-
sider enriching concepts and values from Islam, and how they might be in-
serted into discourses of modernity and globalization. Rather than place
Southeast Asia within narratives that stress American imperialism, or con-
ceive the region’s connections to the Middle East in essentialist terms, per-
haps it is more useful to contemplate the issues raised by the hybridity of
postcolonial Southeast Asian modernities—a hybridity challenged by radical
Islam.

Postcolonial hauntings

Understanding fears in public spaces in Singapore, especially those not spe-

cifically besieged by terrorist attack, requires nuanced accounts of how urban
spaces are being remapped in the contemporary moment. For it is the poten-
tial redrawing of national boundaries that creates apprehension in places like
Holland Village, raising uncertainties concerning belonging/not-belonging in
postcolonial Singapore, or the region more generally. It is this instability that
troubles both the state and public, and fragmentation in countries such as In-
donesia, Thailand, and the Philippines only helps to shape a sense of unease.
Traces of prior urban conflicts, such as the bombs and riots of the 1960s,
make these fears palpable. Add to this the application of Cold War govern-
ment legislation—such as Internal Security and Sedition Acts—and the crea-

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LISA LAW

tion of post-9/11 policies to foster “racial harmony,” and we witness an un-

canny era of Singapore’s history. It is an unstable moment that problematizes
geopolitical “order,” but is not reducible to Washington’s “war on terror.” It is
the return of the ghostly past, with its militant geography, that produces trepi-
dation in the streets.
Recent events in the Middle East have inspired a host of urban conflicts
around the globe. Whether these debates are about Muslim dress in public
spaces in Europe, the profiling of Muslim men in US cities, or the fortifica-
tion of Singapore’s expatriate enclaves, the colonial epoch has returned to
haunt the present in a manner not witnessed since decolonization in the 1950s.
Theorizing conflict in these spaces is not a simple task, as it entails under-
standing the multiple scales within which urban spaces are embedded, and the
complex historical dynamics shaping conflict. As the example of Singapore
shows, urban conflicts summon layers of historical divisions, connections,
and affiliations that do not always include Washington at its geopolitical cen-
tre (although events in America are important). Decentring dominant narra-
tives of “terrorism” enables a remapping of the politics of terror, taking into
consideration other critical geographies and histories that profoundly shape
urban tensions.

Re f e r e n c e s

Bishop, Ryan/Phillips, John/Yeo, Wei Wei (2003) Postcolonial Urbanism:

Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, Routledge: New York.
Chan, Steven/Mandaville, Peter (2001) “Introduction”. In Steven Chan/Peter
Mandaville/Roland Bleiker (eds.) The Zen of International Relations, Lon-
don: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1–14.
Chang, Tou Chuang (1995) “The ‘Expatriation’ of Holland Village”. In
Brenda S.A. Yeoh/Lily Kong (eds.) Portraits of Places: History, Commu-
nity and Identity in Singapore, Singapore: Times Editions.
Davis, Mike (2001) “The Flames of New York”. New Left Review 12, pp.
34–50.
Desker, Barry (2003) “Islam in Southeast Asia: The Challenge of Radical In-
terpretation”. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 16/3, pp. 415–28.
Emmerson, Donald (1984) “Southeast Asia: What’s in a Name?”. Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies 15/1, pp. 1–21.
Freud, Sigmund (1919) “The ‘Uncanny’”. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., Hogarth Press:
London, pp.217–252.
Gelder, Ken/Jacobs, Jane M. (1998) Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and
Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne.

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Gershman, John (2002) “Is Southeast Asia the Second Front?” Foreign Af-
fairs 81/4, pp. 60–68.
Goh, Chok Tong (2002) “Opening remarks”. Dialogue with Community Lead-
ers on the Arrest of the Second Group of Jemaah Islamiyah Members, Minis-
try of Home Affairs, Singapore (available at [Link] [Link]/mha/).
Gordon, Avery (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hamilton-Hart, Natasha (2005) “Terrorism in Southeast Asia: Expert Analy-
sis, Myopia and Fantasy”. The Pacific Review 18/3, pp. 303–325.
International Crisis Group (2002a) “How the Jemaah Islamiyah Terrorist Net-
work Operates”. Indonesia Backgrounder, Asia Report 43, Jakarta/Brussels.
International Crisis Group (2002b) “Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia: The Case of
the ‘Ngruki Network’ in Indonesia”. Indonesia Briefing, Jakarta/Brussels.
Laffan, Michael Francis (2002) Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia:
The Umma Below the Winds, London: Routledge-Curzon.
Miksic, John N./Low Mei Gek, Cheryl-Ann. (2004) Early Singapore:1300s-
1819, Singapore: Singapore History Museum.
National Security Coordination Centre (2004) “The Fight Against Terror:
Singapore’s National Security Strategy”. Singapore: MINDEF.
Republic of Singapore (2003) “White Paper on the Jemaah Islamiyah and the
Threat of Terrorism”. Ministry of Home Affairs, 7 January.
Sa’at, Alfian Bin (2002) “The Racist’s Apology”. Forum on Contemporary
Art and Society (FOCAS) 4, pp. 385–393.
Smith, Neil (2001) “Scales of Terror and the Resort to Geography: 9/11, Oc-
tober 7”. Editorial, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, pp.
631–637.
Van Schendel, Willem (2002) “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ig-
norance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia”. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 20, pp. 647–668.
Wee, C.J. Wan-Ling (1999) “‘Asian values,’ Singapore and the Third Way:
Re-working Individualism and Collectivism”. Sojourn 14/2, pp. 332–58.

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C ult ural H omog eni sat ion, Pl ac es of M emor y,
and t he Lo ss of S ecul ar U rb an Sp ac e

ANIL BHATTI

Postcolonial India’s myth of secularism assumed that the planned evolution of

the good society would be accompanied by the gradual marginalisation of
contradictions between religions, languages, and cultural specificities. Bom-
bay became symptomatic of this myth in film and folklore. Against this back-
ground, cultural homogenisation and identity-based politics occupy places of
memory and heritage sites leading to the contestation of heterogeneous and
homogeneous views of culture.

Conflict and violence have become an integral part of the city in India. In-
stead of becoming an urban space of liberation, the postcolonial city is the
locus of disaster. Whether it is the hopelessly inadequate infrastructure, the
slums, or the social tensions and communal violence, the city has become a
patched-over space of catastrophe. There is a historical background to this.
Much of the social tension in Indian cities today derives from the contradic-
tion between a secular inclusivist idea of India and an exclusivist version of
the homogeneous social order. The Bombay film, ever sensitive to the social
mood suitable for its success, was responsible for reflecting these themes in
the troubled history of the sub-continent from Independence and Partition in
1947, through the dictatorial Emergency in 1975, the Bombay textile strike
and the rise of a fundamentalist right wing after the 1980s, the destruction of
the Babri Masjid in 1992, and the Bombay riots of 1992-93. It may therefore
be helpful to begin by referring to the Indian City, namely Bombay, its favoured

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ANIL BHATTI

artistic genre, the film, and its relationship to the project of constructing a
secular postcolonial India against other restricted versions of the postcolonial
order.1
In the 1950s the popular Hindi film from Bombay had started disseminat-
ing what might be called the secular, international, and yet quintessentially
Indian, vision of post-independence India associated with India’s first Prime
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (cf. Nehru 1999; Khilnani 1997; Chatterjee 1998;
Kapur/Rajadhyaksha 2001; Kaarsholm 2004; Patnaik 2003; Kaarsholm 2002).
This helped to sublimate embarrassing questions of caste/class and make them
bearable through the aesthetics of popular social drama and comedy.
Raj Kapoor’s film Shri 420 (Mr. 420, 1955) became paradigmatic for this
view, and its famous, often quoted song, written by Shailendra and Hasrat
Jaipuri, sums up this post-independence mood of Nehruvian secularism:

Mera juta hai japani/yeh patloon englistani

Sar peh laal topi roosi/phir bhi dil hai hindustani
(My shoe is Japani (Japanese)/these pants are Englistani (English)
The red cap on my head is Russi (Russian)/yet my heart is Hindustani (Indian))

These lines may well be read as an early example of complex cultural encod-
ing and a comfortable affirmation of multiple identities in pluricultural socie-
ties before the postcolonial discussion popularised the term (cf. Csáky/Kury/
Tragatschnig 2004). But the main theme of Shri 420, which was scripted by
Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, is the loss of secular innocence through capitalist cor-
ruption. The number 420 in Raj Kapoor’s film refers to the paragraph con-
cerning cheating in the Indian penal code. The hero of the film, appropriately
and allegorically named Raj,2 succumbs to the lure of money and becomes a
cheat, someone who can be booked under section 420 of the Indian Penal
code, and this is significant for it consolidates Bombay’s reputation as the
richest and most corrupt of Indian cities, a perpetual threat to innocence and
honesty. It is the perennial capitalist Other to the ideals of austerity, honesty,
self-sacrifice, and service inherent in the freedom struggle. Raj, the hapless
victim of avarice, appropriately pawns the honesty medal, which had been his
only prize possession before he was appropriated by the world of money. He
is, in a sense, a victim of money, modernity, and the metropolis, which classic
writings on the city have emphasized (cf. Simmel 1958; Müller 1988: 18). But
it is important to emphasize that the opposition to the Bad City is not some
village idyll. The symbolic overdetermination in the film makes this clear. Raj
himself is an educated migrant with a B.A. degree. His journey to Bombay in

1 Cf. the contributions in Patel, Sujata/Thorner, Alice (1996), and Kaarsholm

(2002) for further literature on the theme of Bombay/Mumbai.
2 Raj Kapoor’s first name “Raj” also means “rule.” It also is synonymous with the
British Raj or “rule.”

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 CULTURAL HOMOGENISATION, PLACES OF MEMORY

search for work starts from the north Indian city of Allahabad, which was Ne-
hru’s birthplace. We see that, among other things, this film is also about the
struggle between rapacious finance and secular idealism for the soul of inde-
pendent India.
All this was, however, in the realm of popular social drama and comedy,
which also made it bearable for large audiences. The Bombay film (irrever-
ently called Bollywood today) had in its repertoire a sufficiently entertaining
view of colonial/postcolonial/modern/postmodern Bombay. Bombay meri
jaan, Majrooh Sultanpuri’s song from the film C.I.D. (1954), sung against a
background of Bombay’s Victorian architecture echoed the ludic irreverence
of the age of entertainment.

Aay dil hai mushkil jeena yahan,

Zara hattke, zara bachke,
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan…
(O heart, its tough living here
Watch out, move aside, this is Bombay my dear…)

“Jaan” literally means life and “meri jaan,” which for the sake of an elusive
rhyme I have rendered as “my dear,” is a term of endearment common in north-
ern India, which puns on Life and Love. Meri jaan is my life/love (cf. Pinto/
Fernandes 2003; Kaviraj 2004). Bombay as a lifeline is also the love in which
the vagabond is irrevocably implicated.
The combination of innocence abroad and streetwise behaviour became
part of the filmic formula in the Bombay idiom. In a complex urban world the
good ultimately did triumph so that a nascent nation had sufficient ground to
believe in a tolerable and tolerant road towards non-aligned, third-world self-
sufficiency, self-reliance, and industrial modernity with retention of flexible
cultural moorings. In those days, one could indeed be pan-Indian and interna-
tional.
This mood will be replaced by the emergence of a confident globalised
Indian diaspora after the 1990s, which then need not enact internationalism on
Indian soil but can look upon the world as its stage, which seems only to exist
together with its icons Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley in order to bring out
India and its film stars’ celluloid uniqueness more effectively:

London dekha, Paris dekha, aur dekha Japan

Michael dekha, Elvis dekha, doosara nahin Hindustan
Eh duniya hai dulhan, dulhan ke maathey ki bindia
I love my India
(London seen, Paris seen, and also Japan
Michael seen, Elvis seen, nothing like Hindustan
The world is a bride, the bride has a bindia 9 [dot] on the forehead
I love my India) (Ray 2004: 173).

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ANIL BHATTI

This is from a 1998 film, Pardes (Abroad). The itinerary of tourism is ticked
off, as it were to reaffirm the smug self of a comfortably globalised indige-
nous urban bourgeoisie using English naturally to convey patriotic sentiments
to the world without seeming odd now, because urban India uses such mark-
ers as signs of its urban multilingual semiotics. This is already a far cry from
the romantic Raj who is recognisably part of a politically defined postcolonial
world order in which India is placed as a perhaps poor but honourable partici-
pant. Ultimately this phase did not last for long, and appropriately the collapse
of the Nehruvian Age of Innocence and the transition to the globalised age of
dependency is summed up with the seismic sensitivity of the Bombay film by
another film lyric which clearly alludes, in a parodistic manner, to the song
from Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420:

Aslam Bhai …
Dubai ka Chashma, Cheen ki Chaddi, aur Irani Chai…
(Brother Aslam…
Spectacles from Dubai, Underwear from China, Irani tea….)

The movement from Raj’s song to Aslam Bhai’s song3 is the movement from
secular internationalism to rapacious globalisation. Spectacles from Dubai,
underwear from China replace the Chaplinesque garb worn by Raj. The tea
will be Indian, but served to Brother Aslam, a self-confident, streetwise Mus-
lim denizen of globalised urban Bombay where drinking tea (chai) in one of
Bombay’s cafes run by members of the Irani community signals urban living.
The Muslim innuendo is of course intended to refer to fundamentalism, the
involvement of the Bombay film world with a mafia underworld controlled
from the Gulf, and so on (“Never get involved with the mafia” is a line in the
song). But more significantly, the demarcation of religious communities and
marking them out of a secular totality becomes apparent through this song.
Retrospectively, the Muslim tag reminds us that Raj is a Hindu name and
Raj’s song from Shri 420, which was supposedly pan-Indian now suddenly
seems revealed as the fragile secular construct that it clearly was.
What concerns us here is the locale of the city as the place (Ort, lieu) of
the secular dream and its loss and destruction (Prakash 2002: 2). For one
thing, the foil to Bombay is not necessarily the idyllic village. The inability of
the innocent migrant worker to live up to ideals is not necessarily linked with
some myth of a village arcadia versus a brutal and anonymous city. The first
encounter scene between the migrant and the city does of course lead to be-
wilderment and disorientation, but the genre sees to it that the hero gets to
know the code very soon. In any case, the vision of India did not necessarily

3 From the film Love ke liye kuch bhi karega (2001). The website [Link]
is a useful source for information on Bombay film.

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oppose the village to the city as substantive categories or life worlds, as there
was usually enough feudal oppression in the village community to escape
from. The myth of Bombay as the city of migrants and as “a heterogeneous
mix of races, religions, and linguistic groups” (Singh 2003: 24), was always
also coupled with problems of survival within the context of the uneven de-
velopment in Indian industrial development and economy (cf. Acharya 2002).
But perhaps Bombay’s main fascination lay in the fact that it was differ-
ent. It did not carry the weight of cultural tradition like Calcutta; nor did it
labour to live up to myths of Imperial grandeur like India’s perennial political
capital Delhi. Bombay was unabashedly the commercial capital of India, and
by accepting the anonymous quality of money as the universal general
equivalent of all values, Bombay too became the place where the tensions in
the two competing visions of India could be played out: the secular and the
fundamentalist.4

II

Some of the above remarks may become clearer if we look at the international
level, where we are witnessing social transformations that are characterised
by two moments. Relatively homogeneous societies are developing into more
complex social formations. On the other hand, existing complex societies are
being subjected to tensions that seem to announce their break up (cf. Bhatti
2005).
The process of European integration may be looked upon as an example
of the first type of transformation process. Large-scale migrations and global-
ising processes are leading to long-term societal transformations and rela-
tively monolingual and homogeneous societies are opening up to the possi-
bilities (both good and bad) of greater pluralism. On the other hand, in a
counter process, traditionally pluricultural5 countries like India, which seemed
to have muddled through to an uneasy systemic balance exemplified by the
slogan of “unity in diversity” characteristic of Nehruvian secularism and plu-
riculturalism, are now increasingly being subjected to fundamentalist pres-

4 The writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto, who lived and worked in the Bombay film
world for twelve years and migrated to Pakistan after the Partition of India in
1947, was perhaps expressing this when he wrote: “That strip of land which is
Bombay had taken me, a footloose young man rejected by his family, into its
vast lap and said to me, ‘You can be happy here on two pennies a day or on hun-
dreds of thousands of rupees… Here you can do what you like; no one will speak
ill of you. And no one will tell you what to do or moralize to you’” (Manto 2001:
17).
5 I use the term “pluriculturalism” rather than “multiculturalism,” which can en-
courage rigid demarcations.

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ANIL BHATTI

sures, which would logically lead to more rigid forms of homogeneous orga-
nization of socio-cultural and political units. In this context, we could remem-
ber the historical paradigm of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The end
of Yugoslavia would be a more drastic contemporary reminder of this second
type of process.
As a result of a questionable extrapolation of the European process of na-
tion formation in the 18th and 19th centuries, fundamentalist thought today fa-
vours organisations that are as homogeneous as possible with regard to lan-
guage, ethnicity, and religion. This in itself is not the explosive point. What is
important is the assumption that this is the “natural” form of organisation of
nation states. The concept of minorities results from this. And thereafter the
negotiation of minority rights (civil rights, religious rights) is established.
It is worth remembering that Johann Gottfried Herder, in his seminal Ideas
on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784), assumed that drastic
migrations and intermingling of peoples had characterised the pre-history of
Europe, and without this process of amalgamation the “General Spirit of
Europe” (Allgemeingeist Europa’s) could hardly have been awakened (Herder
1989: 705). But the whole point of Herder’s thought was then to go on to af-
firm that the historical retention of this diversity would be unnatural, and
therefore wrong. Diversity for him becomes the pre-condition for homogeni-
sation in both temporal as well as categorical terms. Assimilation and amal-
gamation are therefore the necessary and natural part of the pre-history of a
historical process leading to increasing orders of complexity. But this is pre-
cisely why organisational solutions have to be found to deal with this process
as one enters the modern age. In Herder’s thought the most natural social or-
der would be one that corresponds to a divine plan of nature. Since nature
produces families in order to ensure the survival of the species, the most natu-
ral order was that of an organic family. Since the modern nation was to mirror
this order, the most natural state would be an organic state in which one Volk
with one national character would exist. It is this perspective that also leads to
Herder’s anti colonialism and his espousal of cultural mixing. Because colo-
nialism led to an un-natural expansion of states and an unnatural and “wild”
intermingling of the human species and nations under one sceptre, colonial-
ism in Herder’s eyes was, in the modern era, against the plan of nature. If
there is such a thing as an enlightened and liberal philosophy of segregation,
Herder’s thought would lead to it. Multiculturalism as distinct from pluricul-
turalism (cf. Bhargava 1998; Chatterjee 1998; Thapar 2000) seems to me
essentially to go back to this principle of liberal and distancing segregation. I
need not point out here how fraught with problems multiculturalist perspec-
tives are and how vulnerable they are to a distortion through notions of racial
hegemony and ghettoisation, especially against the background of our contem-
porary experience.

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 CULTURAL HOMOGENISATION, PLACES OF MEMORY

It is against the background of the ideology of natural order that we can

understand the nineteenth-century colonial drive towards classification and
schematization in order to achieve something like a “colonial competence”
(similar to a linguistic competence) in order to be able to control the material
world now so suddenly at the disposal of the colonial powers.
The model that dominates seeks to proceed from chaos to order. Com-
plexity is viewed as chaos that does not admit of administrative regulation.
India’s complexity for instance was viewed by colonialism as a chaos that
required domestication. It was domesticated under colonialism by an extraor-
dinary development of classificatory and taxonomic energy (cf. Cohn 1985).
In learning to speak as a colonial power and developing a colonial compe-
tence, the systematic codification of modern Indian language practices was
necessary. Since language and translation are important instruments of power,
a certain type of language ideology developed that ignored overlapping and
real forms of communication in favour of abstract linguistic classification
mixed up with religion. A colonial bureaucratic order destroyed pluralities of
social communication and replaced it with lexicographic classification. Lan-
guages as classified systems became autonomous and therefore negotiable
among classes and communities of people who claimed to represent them. It
then became part of the self-interest of the representatives of the new classi-
fied order and its beneficiaries to sustain the autocratically imposed system of
classification and impart to it the status of being real and natural. In principle
this holds good for the classification of the caste systems and the generation
of subsystems of caste too.

III

Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s short story Toba Tek Singh (1955), which, like the
film Shri 420, has become a foundational text for the contemporary discourse
on the beleaguered state of Indian secularism, would be pertinent here (Manto
1993; Ravikant/Saint 2001). The story has the bleak simplicity and logic of a
Kafkaesque parable. Manto takes the problem to where it belongs, namely to
the realm of madness: A few years after the Partition of the Indian subconti-
nent (1947) it occurs to the governments of India and Pakistan to complete the
exchange of populations based on religious criteria by also exchanging the
inmates of lunatic asylums. Insane Muslims remain in Pakistan and insane
Hindu and Sikh inmates go to India. The logic of Partition dictated this (Hasan
2000). Accordingly, the inmates of the asylum in Lahore (Pakistan) are slated
for exchange. One of the inmates, the Sikh Bishan Singh from the Punjabi
town Toba Tek Singh, has been standing on his feet for fifteen years in the
Asylum, speaking only in a gibberish constructed out of the three languages

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ANIL BHATTI

of Punjab’s continuum of linguistic communication: Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu),

Punjabi, and English. He refuses to be deported, and, after standing on his feet
for fifteen years, collapses in the no-man’s-land between the barbed wires of
India and Pakistan, the creation of which he has cursed in his own private
language, his own gibberish. The piece of land he collapses on becomes, in
Manto’s story, the surrealistic fusion of the man Bishan Singh and his home
Toba Tek Singh. The piece of land between two barbed wires becomes the
geographical placement of this town and the ultimate home of the man, thus
negating the logic of Partition and the creation of hard arbitrary boundaries
cutting across systems of cultural praxis.
Bhishan Singh’s act of resistance can be seen as an act of resistance against
Partition, seen as the final outcome of a complex colonial process, which,
among other things, led to the destruction and reconfiguration of a pluricul-
tural sphere of communication in North India (cf. Bayly 1996; Rai 2001).
This public sphere was by no means a utopian, pacified area. It had its own
system of power, repression, and domination. But, as result of a non-hermeneutic
emphasis on praxis rather than on the hermeneutic strategy of creating differ-
ence in order to understand it, this public sphere functioned in many ways as
an “ecumene” cutting across hard boundaries. Colonialism changed the con-
figuration of the system of power and domination, of course, and privileged
identities that could form coalitions of power through negotiation; or they
could exterminate each other.

IV

Fundamentalism in India has inherited this drive from colonialism. Today,

India’s complexity is threatened by the fundamentalist ideological drive to-
wards religious homogeneity. Fundamentalisms seeks to replace the pluralist
praxis of Hinduism, which has many diverse forms, by creating a monolithi-
cal block, which then marginalises or patronises other religions in India like
Islam or Christianity by stamping them as foreign and therefore implying that
they are unauthentic. In the invidious logic of this “therefore” lies the threat to
a secular India, which means a threat to its pluralistic form of loose diversity.
In a sense, what we are witnessing is the replacement of historically evolved
diversity by the ideologically posited naturalness (Naturwüchsigkeit) of
monochromatic forms. The logic of homogenisation was perhaps propounded
most succinctly by Carl Schmitt, whose influential study of constitutional
law—Verfassungslehre (1928)—treats homogeneity of the Volk (not of hu-
manity) as the basis for the relationship between ruler and ruled (Schmitt
1965: 229f.). The ground for homogenisation may vary, and race, colour, and
religion are the usual candidates, but homogenisation establishes substantial

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 CULTURAL HOMOGENISATION, PLACES OF MEMORY

equality as the basic precondition of Schmitt’s conception of democracy,

which was influential in formulating the ideology of the fascist German state.
It also forms the basis for the distinction between clearly marked and defined
systems of “friend” and “enemy” in Schmitt’s political philosophy. Funda-
mentalisms today have inherited this dubious legacy of inclusion and exclu-
sion.
As against the ideology of the “natural,” homogenised order, the con-
sciously secular postcolonial state dispenses with its legitimatization through
the appeal to any transcendental “natural” order. Secularism is a conscious
utopian construct. It is a fuzzy, diffuse notion, an ideal projected towards the
future as against the hard contours of right-wing ideology based on resent-
ments derived from interpretations of the past. Secularism dispenses with the
tribal principle that bonds through race, religion, and language, which explains
its “vulnerability” and its fragility. It is highly dependent on the success of
modern democratic institutions functioning in an intact manner. It is the po-
litical way of dealing with and sustaining pluriculturalism. This also marks
the attempt to construct a pluriculturalist society of choice (Gesellschaft) as
against a community (Gemeinschaft) defined by religious bonding, to use a
distinction made in 1887 by the sociologist Tönnies (Tönnies 1991). Secular-
ism is a project of the postcolonial Indian state, which is directed against lin-
ear processes of religious homogenisation.
Jawaharlal Nehru tried to capture the linguistic and cultural complexity of
India, its diversity, and unity by using the image of a palimpsest that negates
the essentialisation imposed by authenticity and origins. As he wrote, while in
jail from 1942-45 during the Freedom Struggle, India seemed to him to be an

ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and
yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.
All of these exist together in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not be
aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of
India (Nehru 1999: 59).

This image of the palimpsest, which Victor Hugo also used for Europe
(Lützeler 1982: 442), is admittedly idealistic, but it corresponds in many ways
with the notion of the simultaneity of non-synchronous worlds in any histori-
cal formation (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) that Ernst Bloch formu-
lated in the context of his study of fascism (Bloch 1979). The validity of a
palimpsest lies in its totality and not in any particular layer, for the layering
can be seen as a form of enrichment that leads to the dominance of the multi-
ple. Any attempt to ascribe authenticity to any particular layer or to some
mythical Urtext of culture or history leads to an impoverishment because it
destroys the totality of the process of inscription and the simultaneity of the
latent presence of its multiple layers. Homogenisation is a form of cultural

75
ANIL BHATTI

appropriation that seeks to give exclusive authenticity to a particular layer or

section of a cultural palimpsest. Strictly speaking, however, the Urtext of a
palimpsest would be a blank surface. The drive towards authenticity in a plu-
ralistic society is a drive towards a tabula rasa, an obliteration of complexity.
The destruction inherent in our contemporary wars is this obsession with the
power of erasure.
But if we continue to use Nehru’s idealistic perspective in an affirmative
manner today without looking at the erosion of Indian pluralism through the
rise of fundamentalisms, we lose sight of the utopian content of the ideal of
the palimpsest. Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s last Sigh, which is also
an allegory of India and its iconic city Bombay, therefore withdraws Nehru’s
liberal vision and varies the aporetic possibilities of the figure of the palimp-
sest by resituating it negatively. Contemporary Bombay’s contradictions lie
now in the contradictions between a fictive appearance and a phantom-like
reality, and this is perhaps true of the whole of India. In the novel, the pro-
tagonist, Moor, can comprehend the corrupt soul of his father, Abraham
Zogoiby, only through a negative interpretation of the palimpsest of the city,
now corrupted by the interwoven worlds of politics, crime and money, and
communal violence. India and the city have become a grotesque palimpsest
and a parody of cultural complexity:

The City itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over
World, black market beneath white; when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible
reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings, how then
could Abraham’s career have been any different? How could any of us have escaped that
deadly layering? How, trapped as we were in the hundred per cent fakery of the real, in the
fancy-dress, weeping-Arab kitsch of the superficial, could we have penetrated to the full,
sensual truth of the lost mother below? How could we have lived authentic lives? How
could we have failed to be grotesque? (Rushdie 1996: 184f.).

In the novel, the recovery of the utopian dimensions of a palimpsestic India is

no longer possible through the politics of the present, and thus is located in
artistic praxis. Moor’s mother, Aurora Zogoiby’s ironic project of painting
pictures fuses the memory of the destruction of Europe’s pluriculturalist po-
tentials in the Spain of 1492 with independent India’s potentials in 1947. The
fusion of these two potentials seeks to reconstruct a heterogeneous, pluralistic
India threatened by the forces of homogenisation. And this Utopia of recon-
structed heterogeneity could then be called “Mooristan” or “Palimpstine”
(Rushdie 1996: 226).
In Rushdie’s novel, Palimpstine can be realised only as a dying vision.
This is a realistic perspective because the destruction of palimpsestic perspec-
tive is the bleak reality of India’s recent history. I conclude by referring to the
monopolisation of tradition through fundamentalism. In the North Indian city
of Ayodhya, birth place of Lord Ram, there is a mosque ascribed to the Mogul
emperor Babur (15th century). The Babri Masjid, as it is called, has suppos-

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 CULTURAL HOMOGENISATION, PLACES OF MEMORY

edly been erected on Hindu temple foundations devoted to Lord Ram. Hindu
fundamentalist destroyed the mosque in 1992. If we adhere to the idea of a
palimpsest, then it is in no way surprising that one religious monument should
stand on the foundations of an older and different religious monument. This is
part of the bloody history of the sub continent that we have inherited as a
shared, historical, pluricultural result (Noorani 2003).

If we say that the goal of the secular project was the establishment of a complex
modern society as against the counter project of a single religious community,
we reiterate the difference between heterogeneity and homogeneity. The identi-
fication and occupation of places of memory and its monopolisation destroys
the complexity of the palimpsest. The destruction of the mosque was in fact the
drive to create a blank Urtext as tabula rasa. Places of memory become con-
tested sites for violent appropriations of the past. The destruction of the mosque
by Hindu fundamentalists in December 1992 led to widespread communal vio-
lence between Hindus and Muslims in India. Inventing the myth of origins
seeks to destroy the palimpsest of culture and to replace the multi-layered na-
ture of monuments and sites of memory in a city with uni-dimensional points of
reference to a single past, to a single fundamentalist urban space.
The following illustrations remind us in their stark unambiguity of this
turning point in India’s contemporary history:

Figure 1: The Babri Masjid as it was before December 1992

(Photo: © Shaid Khan, [Link]

77
ANIL BHATTI

Figure 2: Storming the mosque

(Photo: © [Link] [Link]

Figure 3: The result of destruction

(Photo: © [Link] [Link]

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 CULTURAL HOMOGENISATION, PLACES OF MEMORY

What remains after stone and rubble? A reference to another work of art may
serve as a tentative conclusion. In Speaking Stones, an installation by the artist
N. M. Rimzon,

Figure 4: Speaking Stones; N. M. Rimzon (Photo: © N.M. Rimzon)

we see the figure of a mourner crouching within a circle of stone fragments

that hold down photographs of India’s history of communal violence, which,
invoked in this manner, become testimony to the history of violence and our
“responsibility to grieve” (Kapur 2003: 59).
We have here an instance of how the labour and work of mourning and
grieving (Trauerarbeit) lead to what one may, following Peter Weiss, call the
Aesthetics of Resistance (Weiss 1975-81), which has emerged out of India’s
troubled trajectory from secular visions to violent struggles over the control of
the memory of the past. Combined with mass movements for the renewal of
secular politics, this has the potential to restate the projects in favour of cul-
tural complexity in contemporary India and its beleaguered cities.

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Bayly, Christopher Allan (1996) Empire and Information. Intelligence gather-
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Bhargava, Rajeev (ed., 1998) Secularism and its Critics, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Bhatti, Anil (2005) “Der koloniale Diskurs und Orte des Gedächtnisses.” In
Moritz Csáky/Monika Sommer (eds.) Kulturerbe als soziokulturelle Praxis,
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Bloch, Ernst (1979) Erbschaft unserer Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Chatterjee, Partha (1998) Wages of Freedom. Fifty Years of the Indian Na-
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Csáky, Moritz/Kury, Astrid/Tragatschnig, Ulrich (eds., 2004) Kultur-Identität-
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Cohn, Bernhard S. (1985) “The Command of Language and the Language of
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versity Press, pp. 276-329.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1989) Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
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Kaarsholm, Preben (ed., 2004) City Flicks. Indian Cinema and the Urban Ex-
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Kapur, Geeta/Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (2001) “Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001”.
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Kapur, Geeta (2003) “subTerrain: artists dig the contemporary”. In body. city.
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Kaviraj, Sudipto (2004) “Reading a Song of the City – Images of the City in
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Khilnani, Sunil (1997) The Idea of India, London: Hamish Hamilton.
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Manto, Sa’adat Hasan (1993) “Toba Tek Singh”. In Balraj Menra/Sharad Dutt
(eds.) Dastavez, Delhi: Rajkamal, pp. 192-198.
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Müller, Lothar (1988) “Die Großstadt als Ort der Moderne. Über Georg Sim-
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Nehru, Jawaharlal (1999) The Discovery of India, New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Noorani, A.G. (2003) The Babri Masjid, 1528-2003. ‘A Matter of National
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Patel, Sujata/Thorner, Alice (eds., 1996) Bombay: Metaphor for Modern In-
dia, Bombay: Oxford University Press.
Patnaik, Prabhat (2003) The Retreat to Unfreedom. Essays on the Emerging
World Order, New Delhi: Tullika.
Pinto, Jerry/Fernandes, Naresh (eds., 2003) Bombay, meri jaan, New Delhi:
Penguin.
Prakash, Gyan (2002) “The Urban Turn”. In Preben Kaarsholm (ed.) The Cit-
ies of Everyday Life. The Sarai Reader 2, Delhi: Sarai., pp. 2-7.
Rai, Alok (2001) Hindi Nationalism, Delhi: Orient Longman.
Ravikant/Saint, Tarun K. (eds., 2001) Translating Partition, New Delhi.
Ray, Manas (2004) “Chalo Jahaji. Bollywood in the Tracks of Indenture to
Globalization”. In Preben Kaarsholm (ed.) City Flicks. Indian Cinema and
the Urban Experience, Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books, pp. 140-
182.
Rushdie, Salman (1996) The Moor’s last Sigh, London: Vintage.
Schmitt, Carl (1965) Verfassungslehre, Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt.
Simmel, Georg (1958) Philosophie des Geldes, Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt.
Singh, Khushwant (2003) “Impressions of Bombay”. In Jerry Pinto/Naresh
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Suhrkamp.

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II. SPATIALIZING IDENTITIES
The Po lit ic s and Po et ic s of R eligion:
Hindu Pro ce ss ions and Urb a n Conflicts

LILY KONG

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visi-
bility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while
contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously
surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular
Singapore, I will examine the state’s management of a Hindu procession,
Thaipusam; the tactics of adaptation, negotiation, and resistance that partici-
pants engage in; and the participants’ experience of these processions, in-
cluding the nature of their “sacred experience.”1

Introduction

Processions have long been an integral part of religious life. They are among
the most visible of religious activities in public spaces, and thus have the
greatest opportunity for contact with secular activities and religious practices
of other faiths. Because they tend towards the “spectacular,” they heighten the
potential for conflict. As events that attract crowds, the possibility of violence
is real, as the experience in many countries reminds us. The politics of such
events must be understood to avoid the troubles in various parts of the world.

1 This is an abriged version of a fuller paper titled “Religious processions: urban

policitcs and poetics“ that has appeared in Temenos, the Nordic Journal of
Comparative Religion (2005) Volume 41, No. 2, pp. 225–49.

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LILY KONG

To understand the politics, it is imperative to understand the meanings and

values invested in such events—the poetics—thus enabling policy-makers and
enforcement agencies to become aware of what sacred meanings are negotia-
ble and which should remain fixed values.
Much of the geographical literature on processions addresses secular pro-
cessions, including national parades (Kong and Yeoh 1997) and community
parades (Jackson 1988, Lewis/Pile 1996). A parallel literature on religion deals
with pilgrimages (cf. Kong 1990; Kong 2001). Indeed, there are many similari-
ties between the nature and experience of processions and pilgrimages, though
the latter is at a larger scale, often traversing greater distances, involving greater
commitment of time, and possibly enduring more privations. In drawing on
insights from existing literatures, I engage with the literatures on both secular
processions and religious pilgrimages.
What is the nature of processional experience? In particular, in modern
cities where functionalist urban planning may come up against sacred sites,
and where Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim may live cheek by
jowl, what sorts of conflicts have to be negotiated in the continued perform-
ance of such religious practice? I explore this question using the multirelig-
ious case of Singapore, an officially secular city-state where all the major
world religions are represented. This analysis is a focus on the micro-politics
of urban life and its conflicts, pursued on the basis that such micro-politics is
constitutive of the macro-politics of religious conflicts, manifested in relig-
iously-based wars and unrest. Such macro-politics has historical roots, but is
also daily constituted and reinforced through a micro-politics of friction that
often appears less dramatic, less serious, less pressing than the drama and
spectacle of religious wars, but which nevertheless is very real and influential
in the warp and woof of everyday life.

Processions and pilgrimages: Some approaches

Pilgrimage is a “social construction, and inevitably, a cultural product” (Gra-

ham/Murray 1997: 389). The cultural product must, in turn, be understood in
relation to its social, political, and historical contexts. The multidisciplinary
literatures on pilgrimage recognize this social and cultural constructedness,
and acknowledge how social relations are (re)enacted or challenged during pil-
grimages, resulting on occasion in conflict, but also in reinforcement of com-
munity and identity.
Pilgrimages are thought to temporarily bring together individuals dispa-
rate in age, occupation, gender, ethnicity, social class, and power. Pilgrimages
bond together, “however transiently, at a certain level of social life, large
numbers of men and women who would otherwise never have come into con-

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tact” (Turner 1974: 178). Pilgrimages therefore function as occasions during

which communitas is experienced, and is a liminal experience, involving ab-
rogation of secular social structure.
In contrast, scholars such as Eade and Sallnow (1991) argue that pilgrim-
age is a pluralist experience, a realm in which there are competing religious
and secular discourses, leading to the reinforcement of social boundaries and
distinctions rather than their dissolution. This is illustrated in a range of stud-
ies (e.g. Graham/Murray 1997; Murray/Graham 1997) where the multiple
meanings of the pilgrimage route and site give rise to tensions and conflicts.
Religious processions, at a scale smaller than pilgrimages, nevertheless en-
capsulate many of the issues confronted in pilgrimage analysis, and, indeed,
are not unlike the experience of secular processions, for which analyses exist
of pageants, parades, and Carnival.
Parades and processions “[serve] as a means to focus attention of private
people on their collective life and the values they [espouse] through it” (Go-
heen 1993: 128). Not only do they mark out space, such “civic rituals” also
represent “time apart,” for they are “time separated from the normal activi-
ties” (Goheen 1993: 128). They also stress shared values and reinforce group
cohesion by emphasising belonging. Further, they may be “characterized as
demonstrations of community power and solidarity and serve as complex
commentaries on the political economy or urban-industrial social relations”
(Marston 1989: 255). On the other hand, these events may also reflect the spa-
tial constitution of symbolic resistance, achieved through the symbolic rever-
sal of social status (Jackson 1988). They offer a temporary respite from nor-
mal relations of subordination and domination, and thus offer a potential plat-
form for protest, opposition, and resistance (Jackson 1988: 222). Yet, as Jack-
son (1988: 216) points out, the symbolic reversal of social status during these
events should not be confused with subversion because it only serves to reaf-
firm the permanence of the social hierarchy. What they offer is a temporary
respite from normal relations.

Fieldwork context

Thaipusam is celebrated in many parts of the world by ethnic communities

from South India, such as Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, Durban, Toronto, Malay-
sia, and Singapore. It marks the birthday of Lord Subramaniam, one of the
sons of Shiva. The spectacle of the event revolves around a device called a
kavadi carried by participants along a processional route. Some may even
pierce themselves with skewers or attach hooks to their bodies. The proces-
sions are generally accompanied by music and chanting. Some participants

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LILY KONG

also enter a religious trance during the procession. Generally, those who take
part in the procession do so as a form of thanksgiving for prayers answered.
In Singapore, Thaipusam is an annual event in which the state’s management
has evolved. Religious processions in Singapore are carefully monitored and
managed, a caution rooted in history. On 21 July 1964, during a procession
celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, riots broke out as the Malay-
Muslim procession passed through an area predominantly populated by Chi-
nese. Different accounts exist of how the riots started. Regardless of what
happened, given this precedent, much care is given to manage public events,
including Thaipusam.
Two Hindu community leaders shared with me insights into the organisa-
tion of the procession. Annually, two to three months before Thaipusam, an
application is made by the Hindu Endowments Board (HEB), on behalf of the
two temples involved (marking the start and end point of the procession,
respectively) and participating devotees, to the police to obtain a permit to
hold the procession. Additionally, along the processional route are tents set up
by Hindu devotees, serving water or milk to those participating in the
procession. Tent owners also have to apply to the police for permits after
seeking endorsement from the HEB. Following these applications, the police
convene a meeting with the HEB and representatives from the two temples to
discuss the ground rules and problems encountered during the last festival, so
as to propose ways of addressing them.
Almost 10,000 participants can be expected annually: more than 8,000
carry milk pots, and more than 1,000 carry kavadis. Additionally, there are
many more who set up tentage, and others who help the devotees. The logisti-
cal task is huge, given this scale of events. The two temples thus issue “rules,
regulations and conditions governing Thaipusam,” constructed to observe
state rules pertaining to assemblies and processions (encapsulated in the Mis-
cellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act and its related subsidi-
ary legislation), and to manage the event. Individual kavadi carriers have to
buy tickets from the temples to participate in the procession and pay a fee to
defray the cost of organizing the event and handling the logistics. Big kavadi
carriers pay more because they “take up the most space and need the most
supervision” (ST 23 Dec 1999). Kavadi carriers have to inform the temples of
the size and weight of their kavadis, which should not exceed certain limits (4
m from the ground up and 2.9 m in diameter), so as to ensure that they do not
pose safety hazards to traffic or street wires. Devotees carrying milk pots may
leave Perumal Temple from 2:00 a.m. onwards on Thaipusam Day, but kava-
dis and rathams (shrines on wheels) have between 7:00 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. to
leave the Perumal temple. At the other end, the doors of the Thendayuthapani
Temple will close at 10 p.m. Tickets are issued upon payment, and devotees
are given specific times when they should assemble at Sri Perumal, in order

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that the crowds may be managed. Further, all forms of musical instruments
and recorded music are not allowed along the processional route. Only holy
music is allowed within the temples’ premises. The temples’ rules end with a
warning that any infringement will result in the prosecution of devotees
and/or supporters by the police and the devotees being barred from future fes-
tivals.

Religious processions and the making of

social relations

Davis’ (1986: 6) description of nineteenth-century Philadelphia parades as

“public dramas of social relations” provides an apt perspective for examining
the Thaipusam procession in Singapore. Just as the nineteenth-century pa-
rades “define who can be a social actor,” Thaipusam was both an occasion for
boundary-making and one for reinforcing social ties, in particular, religious
community, family, and friendship ties.
As an occasion for boundary-making, Thaipusam reminds us that a com-
munity is not devoid of internal tensions, and is not always characterized by
homogeneous, or even consensual, traits and views. Thus, boundaries are
internal to the Hindu community, as they are between the Hindu and other
communities in multi-religious Singapore. The procession surfaced conflicts
and tensions within the community, evident in two main ways. First, the latent
discontent with a prominent foreign-worker population in Singapore, and in
this particular instance, with an Indian foreign-worker population, is fore-
grounded in a public performance such as Thaipusam, with crowdedness and
disorderliness attributed to them. One interviewee complained that the proces-
sion had become very protracted, with many delays, because of the growth in
the number of kavadi carriers and the larger crowds. He attributed this to the
increase in the number of foreign workers participating. Another intimated
that “Thaipusam has been spoilt” because of the intrusion and rowdiness of
“foreign elements.” Yet others pointed fingers at “the younger generation”
instead. One interviewee blamed the “youngsters,” criticizing “the way they
dance, the way they cheer, the way they change those movie songs to God
songs.” Boundary-making thus drew on age, class, and nationality as divisive
factors.
The consciousness of “self” and “other” was also evident through repeated
references to boundaries between the Hindu community and other communi-
ties. These references revealed awareness that this public display of Hinduism
had the power to shape public perceptions about the Hindu community, and
also offered the occasion for the “other” to show sensitivity to the Hindu
community. In the former instance, Hindu interviewees referred to the unruly

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behaviour of some young Hindu boys in the processions, and expressed deep
regret that “You have other races watching you, so when all these happen, it
gets wrong ideas into people’s heads about us.” In the latter instance, some
interviewees expressed disappointment at the lack of understanding and re-
spect by other communities of the sacredness of the event:

Frankly speaking, it is okay for them to watch, but I think there are members of the public
who are not dressed properly and who don’t behave well. […] We feel very offended when
we are participating. […] We like people to be more properly attired rather than coming as
though you are going for a show, a disco (Shamala, late 30s).

Simultaneously, the procession did not just serve as occasions of internal and
external boundary-making. It was also an opportunity for the reinforcement of
family and friendship ties, and the reaffirmation of community identity. At the
most fundamental, the commitment to Thaipusam was viewed as a total fam-
ily obligation. Mano, who has participated annually in Thaipusam for 27
years, says:

I have seen cases where people take it just for granted. Everybody carry, I also can carry.
After they start walking, they just collapse. Just cannot fulfill the route. And some of them,
when you’re piercing, you can see them pinching because it’s painful. It’s hurting them. I
wouldn’t really say whether they did fast properly or not, but I know there’s something
wrong. Something is not right in the family. Maybe they did not fast. Maybe in the house, in
the family, something is wrong. When I want to carry the kavadi, the whole family joins in.
We all fast together.

This family involvement has the effect of bringing the family together. Such
family participation extends to the day of the procession itself, during which
family and friends provide both practical and moral support. Mohan says:

Just say for example, this big chariot which I carry. For some reason, if I can’t pull it, some-
body can help me to push. And if this big kavadi I’m carrying, for some reason I cannot
carry, balance myself, the people all round, four of them, could hold me and … [help to]
adjust it. And in the worst case, if you really cannot walk, they can dismantle it and bring
you to the temple in whatever way they could help. Yes you need them to help because you
will never know…That’s why it’s not just you yourself. I may be in the procession, but eve-
rybody is helping, also participating in this holy festival.

Spiritually and emotionally, Rama acknowledges the need for support, when
the journey gets long and delayed:

The procession is about four km, and at some point of time, there would be a jam, and we
have to wait for 2
, three hours. During that period, family is there or friends or relations to
give you the moral boost.

But the strengthening of social relations is not confined to pre-existing ties.

The sense of community among participants and well-wishers is enhanced

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 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF RELIGION

through the support given to those completing the thanksgiving journey, even
among strangers. As Vani shared:

Usually what happens is that after you are done with your procession, that means you have
finished your task already, right. So then, it doesn’t have to be someone that you know. You
can also carry on and cheer along with everybody else, even if it is strangers. It does not
have to be someone you know. We cheer other participants along to encourage them to the
finish.

When probed, Vani and others were clearly aware of the boisterous youths
and burgeoning foreign workers, and indeed expressed their annoyance and
disapproval. Yet, their enthusiasm and support for participants, particularly
when nearing the destination, were co-existent with their awareness of social
difference. They did not feel a sense of egalitarian association, after the man-
ner of Turner’s (1974) communitas. Rather, it was a sense of support for those
who have made sacrifices and bore the privations of the journey, not unlike
support for athletes on the track. This did not amount to a numbing heap of
emotions “where the lofty is combined with the low, the great with the insig-
nificant, the wise with the stupid” (Folch-Serra 1990: 265). The experience of
communitas, long accepted in many anthropological writings about pilgrim-
age, did not replicate itself in the context of the Thaipusam procession in Sin-
gapore. This may suggest that pilgrimages and processions are not directly
comparable, but it may also suggest that the sense of sameness and egalitarian
association may be a somewhat romanticized interpretation of the pilgrim ex-
perience.

Religious processions and the negotiation

of poetics and politics

Religious processions also exist at the nexus of “poetic” performance and

public politics, the negotiation of which forms the analysis in this section.
Conceptually, I have framed the material in terms of the negotiation of sound-
scapes, timescapes, and sacred pathways, reflecting the multiple dimensions
of the processional phenomena.

Negotiating aural space

That Thaipusam occupies aural space, and derives significant meaning from the
manufacture and consumption of sound, may not have been so apparent if music
did not become subject to policy and policing. No interviewee failed to discuss
the significance of music to the creation of an appropriate atmosphere, and as an

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integral part of the ceremony. Many took pains to explain the place of music in
religion and in this particular public performance. Pany shared this perspective:

Music is part of religion. If you notice, the drums, the long pipes played during prayers …
traditionally, music, dances, language were performed in the temples, where culture was
propagated. For the kavadi carriers, the music is to let them forget the pain and let them
concentrate and to fulfill their mission.

However, over the years, restrictions have come to be placed on the noise le-
vel generated at public events. Music is disallowed along the processional
route. This reflects a larger policy in Singapore, applicable in a variety of con-
texts. For example, the traditional Islamic call to prayer used to be made on a
loudspeaker, outward from a mosque. It became regulated because, with popu-
lation growth and urbanization, such sound production risked being regarded
as intrusive by those not involved in that religion (Lee 1999). State regula-
tions on “noise pollution” were therefore introduced, including turning the
loudspeakers inwards towards the mosque, specifying acceptable noise levels
for events such as Chinese operas, funeral processions, church bells, record
shops, and places of entertainment. Even state-endorsed nation-building ac-
tivities, such as pledge recitation in schools, are subject to these rules.
As a consequence, the desired “poetic” value of music is lost, and the con-
tinuing quest has become one for aural, not physical, space for religious activ-
ity. This politics of sound and space is expressed in a variety of ways, from
the most supportive to actions that attempt to circumvent the intent of the law.
At one end of the spectrum, Vani expresses full support for the regulations:

I fully support the government doing this … because teenagers especially tend to take ad-
vantage if there are no rules, so they made the whole procession look like a hooligan get-
together because they would dress in black and they end up taking garbage cans and turning
them upside down like playing drums. So what happens was that it led to unnecessary fights
because you have a lot of gangs there and compete who can make louder noise and stuff like
that. … So after the restrictions were imposed, you can’t find things like that now and it
looks more festive.

Others accept, but without the same sense of support, such as Rama, who
points to Singapore’s perceived political culture of compliance:

I think we just learn … you know we Singaporeans are so obedient. As long as the govern-
ment says, we obey, you know. We may complain, but ultimately we still follow the rules.

In contrast, others are quite vituperative. Mano offers a pointed critique, and
reveals that appeals have been made to no effect:

We asked the temple and everything. They said no, they said it’s against the law. Most of them,
some of them, even myself, sometimes, I say walking like that, it’s just like attending a funeral
with no music and all. … Sometimes, with so many regulations, after a while, you’re fulfilling
the vows and everything, you should do it happily. Wholeheartedly. Not while cursing some-
body.

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For some, the appeal is built on the logic that if there are those misbehaving,
action should be taken against them rather than to have a blanket ban on mu-
sic, thus calling on the authorities to be more discriminatory in their strategies
of management.
Finally, in a circuitous way, some interviewees point out that it is because
musical instruments are banned that there are those who use empty tin cans
and dustbins for improvisation, thus resisting sanctions in symbolic ways:

These guys use dustbins. So when they see the police officer, they just put it down. After
that they just pick it up again (Shamala).

Thus, the ban on music led to the creation of improvised sound, which in turn
led to the perception amongst other participants and observers of a lack of re-
spect and religious value, thereby ironically prompting their support of a ban.

Negotiating sacred time

Just as the poetics and politics of soundscapes are negotiated in aurally

defined sacred space, so too has the bracketing of time come to shape the
practice of religion. In the history of religion, particular days and specific
times of the day have traditionally been set aside for religious practice, what
Eliade (1959) has referred to as “sacred time,” set apart from secular time. In
contemporary society, what time is marked out as sacred is again a negotiated
outcome between secular and religious agents. This is evident at two levels in
the context of Thaipusam in Singapore: in the official appointment of public
holidays tied to religious festivals, and in the allocation of time for religious
activity in the public sphere. Indeed, apart from the choice of the day, other
aspects of managing that time are much more guided by pragmatic secular
considerations than religious ones.
In the official Singapore calendar, a series of public holidays are identi-
fied, corresponding to religious festivals for Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and
Christians. There are also the culturally defined ones: New Year’s Day and
Chinese New Year, and secular public holidays: Labour Day and National
Day. The choice of religious festivals that deserve public holiday status in
many ways defines the extent of religious activity and participation that is
facilitated for particular religious groups. Thus, several interviewees lamented
the lack of a public holiday for Thaipusam and attendant difficulties. Shamala
explained that, as she was not able to take time off work, she had to partici-
pate in the procession very early in the morning or late in the evening. This
posed other problems—the extra cost of transportation in the early hours of
the morning, recalling that milk pot bearers start at 2:00 a.m. (“you have to

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pay double charges for taxis”), and the congestion in the post-work rush hour
(“tempers flare for those in the traffic jam held up by us”).
And what of the bracketing of time within the day itself? This is guided
by temple regulations based on pragmatic considerations of crowd control and
safety, as well as by self “regulation,” based on the pragmatics of tropical,
urban living. Temple regulations stipulate that those carrying milk pots may
start at 2:00 a.m., though kavadis and rathams may only begin at 7:00 a.m., with
the last participant beginning at 7:30 p.m. This bracketing of time is based essen-
tially on pragmatic considerations to spread out the activities over as many
hours as possible to avoid congestion, and to have those with the bigger para-
phernalia (kavadis and rathams) on the streets only after the break of light.
Additionally, participants further bracket the time in view of the hot afternoon
sun in Singapore, so that few take to the streets during the afternoon hours.
Whereas scholars of religion have written about sacred time as set apart from
ordinary time, during which religious activities are propitious, in the context
of Thaipusam processions, apart from the identification of a sacred day,
which hours of the day particularly attract religious activity and which do not
are guided more by pragmatic considerations than religious ones.

Negotiating sacred pathways

The processional route begins from Sri Srinivasa Perumal in Serangoon Road
and ends in Sri Thendayuthapani in Tank Road, a journey of some 4 km. The
former is in the heart of Singapore’s Little India district, and the journey
brings participants past a number of temples in that district. Previously, the
route was symbolically significant because participants would wind past the
Kaliaman2 Temple (known as the “mother’s temple”), and the Sivan Temple
(known as the “father’s temple”) in Dhoby Ghaut. Devotees passing these tem-
ples would therefore pay homage to the “mother” and “father.” However, the
Sivan temple was relocated from the Dhoby Ghaut area to a temporary site
next to Sri Perumal in 1984, and then to a permanent site in Geylang East in
1993. This move occurred because of the construction of a mass rapid transit
station where it stood, and, despite appeals to the contrary, it was relocated.
Since 1993, the deity Siva has been brought annually to Sri Perumal on
the eve of Thaipusam, staying there until the next night. This allows devotees
to pay homage to the “father” from the start of the procession, before passing
by the “mother” en route to Sri Thendayuthapani. In short, despite the commu-
nity’s investment of symbolic meaning in the Sivan temple and its location, secu-
lar priorities prevailed, and ritual adjustments were introduced to manage secular
changes that impact on religious practice.

2 Kaliaman is the consort of Siva.

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 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF RELIGION

Co n c l u s i o n s

Since 1964, when the Mohammedan procession erupted into riot, Singapore
has been carefully managing the public expression of religion, and indeed,
other processions involving assemblies of people and public displays of spec-
tacle. This is understandable, particularly given how the preceding analysis
endorses the view that processions are arenas for competing religious and
secular discourses, and are multivocal, of social and political significance.
In focusing on the social and political dimensions of procession, I have il-
lustrated how social relations (including family, friendship, and inter- and
intra-community ties) are reinforced or challenged through the event. I have
also demonstrated how belief in egalitarian association on account of common
participation and mutual support among participants is misplaced. I conclude
therefore that the traditional concept of communitas associated with pilgrim-
ages and the notion of solidarity, belonging, and group cohesion in proces-
sions perhaps remain relevant in some ways, but may have been over-
extended in a somewhat romanticized notion of egalitarianism and bounded
community.
Politically, the processions are occasions when meanings are balanced and
negotiated by state, temple, and religious individual. These may revolve around
the significance of sound in religious experience and the associated symbolic
resistance to state prohibitions and temple regulations. They may be about the
secular acknowledgement of religious time through suitable bracketing out of
that time in the secular calendar. They may involve the ritual adjustments
made to accommodate state modifications of sacred pathways. In all of these,
the politics at work is not that of overt confrontation or party politics or grand
strategy, but one of everyday negotiations and local-level “tactics” (de Certeau
1984). Given Singapore’s freedom of worship policy, time and space have
been available for adherents to participate in the procession (despite some
inconvenience). Participants have also been able to renegotiate meanings and
values, finding ways to make music and pay homage to the “father” god. As a
consequence, one of the conditions for the negative violence and aggression
sometimes associated with religion in general, and such events in particular, is
removed, that is, extreme feelings of deprivation in relation to the practice of
one’s faith. However, the seeds of some dispirited, and sometimes exasper-
ated, disappointment are present, directed at the constraints on religious mu-
sic-making, the perverse and unintended encouragement it gives to rowdy
noise-makers on the pretext of creating an aurally-defined sacred atmosphere
for participants, the crowdedness of the event, which lends itself to a channel-
ing of frustrations towards “foreigners” and “youngsters,” and the absence of
an acknowledgement of this religious event via marking on the secular calen-
dar, which is deemed to further contribute to early morning pre-workday crowd-

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edness. Together, they have not seemed sufficient to constitute severe discon-
tent. Nevertheless, it is imperative that these sources of irritation and discon-
tent are recognized, with potential adjustments made to policy as circum-
stances change, for example, when the number of participants and observers
grow, or when the profile of participants changes.
Finally, that religious experience is a multifaceted one bears emphasis here.
Sacred space is defined visually and materially through landscapes, but it is
also constituted of soundscapes and timescapes. Religion, to that extent, is an
integrative institution, and religious experience may be best understood as a
wholly integrated one, of sight, sound, emotion, time. It is only with this un-
derstanding that secular rules and regulations may be crafted to achieve
pragmatic secular ends, particularly in multireligious urban contexts, while
respecting religious imperatives.

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Century Philadelphia, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven F.
Rendail, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eade, John/Sallnow, Michael J. (eds.) (1991) Contesting the Sacred: The An-
thropology of Christian Pilgrimage, New York: Routledge, Chapman and
Hall.
Eliade, Mircea (1959) The Sacred And The Profane: The Nature Of Religion,
Translated from French by Willard R. Trask, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich.
Folch-Serra, Mireya (1990) “Place, voice, space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogi-
cal-landscape”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8, pp.
255–74.
Goheen, Peter G. (1993) “The ritual of the streets in mid-19th-century To-
ronto”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11, pp. 127–45.
Graham, Brian/Murray, Michael (1997) “The spiritual and the profane: the
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Planning D: Society and Space 6, pp. 213–27.
Kong, Lily (1990) “Geography and religion: trends and prospects”. Progress
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Kong, Lily (2001) “Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: politics and poet-
ics of modernity”. Progress in Human Geography 25/2, pp. 211–33.

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Kong, Lily/Yeoh, Brenda S.A. (1997) “The construction of national identity

through the production of ritual and spectacle: an analysis of National Day
Parades in Singapore”. Political Geography 16/3, pp. 213–39.
Lee, Tong Soon 1999, “Technology and the production of Islamic space: the
call to prayer in Singapore”. Ethnomusicology 43, pp. 86–100.
Lewis, Clare/Pile, Steve (1996) “Woman, body, space: Rio Carnival and the
politics of performance”. Gender, Place and Culture 3/1, pp. 23–42.
Marston, Sallie A. (1989) “Public rituals and community power: St. Patrick’s
Day parades in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1841–1874”. Political Geography
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Murray, Michael/Graham, Brian (1997) “Exploring the dialectics of route-
based tourism: the Camino de Santiago”. Tourism Management 18/8, pp.
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Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press.

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N eg o t iat in g t h e C it y—E v ery day Fo rm s of
Segr egat ion in M iddl e C l as s C airo

ANOUK DE KONING

As a consequence of economic restructuring, Cairo’s urban landscape has

seen increased social polarization and segregation. In order to explore these
changes, I examine the urban trajectories of young upper-middle class wo-
men. Their trajectories highlight the ways in which social distance and segre-
gation are embedded in the minutiae of the urban landscape and the fabric of
city life. Their privileged lifestyles and routines hinge on combinations of
class privilege, social avoidance, and segregation.1

This paper attempts to read the urban landscape by exploring the ways spe-
cific people move through it. These specific people are young female upper-
middle class professionals in Cairo. To walk the city with these urbanites allows
me to bring out some of the logics implicit in urban life, to map the knowl-
edge and the specific cartographies movement through the city presupposes.
Their urban trajectories, moreover, offer a complex picture of Cairo’s public
spaces and allow a glimpse of the everyday life of segregation in what has
been called “Egypt’s new liberal age” (Denis 1997).
My ethnographic observations speak to a larger story of a shift from a de-
velopmental to a more neoliberal state, and the effects of this shift on Cairo’s
professional middle class. While the mid-1970s saw a move away from the

1 This contribution is an abridged version of a longer chapter of my dissertation on

the changing sociocultural landscape of middle-class Cairo under conditions of
neoliberal policies and a search for global inclusion (cf. de Koning 2005). This
article has profited much from a follow-up research trip in 2004 that was finan-
cially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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ANOUK DE KONING

earlier national development path with Sadat’s infitaah (open-door) policies,

attempts to transform Egypt into a more liberal market economy integrated
into the global market sped up significantly in the 1990s with Egypt’s adop-
tion of structural adjustment policies.
In Egypt’s new liberal age, new lines of segmentation in schooling, the
labor market, and consumption are giving rise to new divisions and distinc-
tions within Cairo’s professional middle class. These divisions and distinc-
tions rely importantly on cosmopolitan capital: familiarity with Western rep-
ertoires and standards—for example, fluency in English—as well as the ability
to participate in distinctive cosmopolitan lifestyles (de Koning 2005). There is a
still tentative formation of a distinct professional upper-middle class, which is
employed in the more internationally oriented up-market segment of the urban
economy and inhabits Cairo’s up-market spaces. This up-market segment of
the urban economy offers relatively good wages and careers when compared
to the meager pay of the generally highly insecure private sector employment
or the low-level government jobs on which less privileged middle-class strata
are forced to rely. While the latter often range from 150 to 1000 LE, wages in
the up-market sector might start at 1000 LE, but can reach 10,000 LE.
The upper-middle class professionals employed in this up-market segment
can be seen as the protagonists of new state narratives and projects. They are
the ones who can match global standards and staff transnational workspaces,
not unlike India’s “new middle class,” which, as Leela Fernandes argues, is
constructed as “the social group which is able to negotiate India’s new rela-
tionship with the global economy in both cultural and economic terms” (2000:
91). These divisions have their counterpart in the urban landscape, most nota-
bly in the form of the upscale coffee shops that have carved out a specifically
young, upper-middle class presence in Cairo’s landscape.

By examining the urban trajectories of some female upper-middle class pro-

fessionals in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, I explore the way these chang-
ing class configurations are expressed in, and constituted through, the urban
landscape. I first explore the ways in which gender, class, and space combine
in the constitution of the coffee shop as a “safe space.” I then turn to the more
ambivalent spaces of the street and explore the ways these women navigate
these “unsafe spaces.” I finally come back to the insights that can be drawn
with respect to the changing features of Cairo’s urban landscape.

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 NEGOTIATING THE CITY

The “safe” space of the coffee shop

Cairo’s up-market districts are dotted with coffee shops and restaurants that
serve a mixed-gender clientele. Up-market coffee shops, modelled after Ame-
rican examples like Starbucks, have become an essential part of the daily rou-
tines of many young and relatively affluent Cairenes. These coffee shops,
always referred to in English, are never to be confused with ‘ahawi baladi, the
male-dominated sidewalk cafes for which Cairo is famous. Different coffee
shops have become spatial orientation points, as well as markers of social be-
longing. A new and distinctive leisure culture has emerged in and around
these coffee shops, centered on, but not exclusive to, young single affluent
professionals. Yet coffee shops are a relatively recent phenomenon. Coffee
shops started appearing in the mid-1990s in central affluent districts like
Zamalek and Mohandisseen, as well as in outlying Heliopolis and Maadi.
New coffee shops open regularly, crowding certain streets and turning for-
merly residential areas into lively Downtown hotspots.

Figure 1: Coffee shop Beano’s in Zamelek, an upscale neighbourhood in Cairo

(Photo: © Anouk de Koning)

An elderly middle-class lady shook her head when I told her about the signifi-
cant female public presence in such coffee shops. Those frequenting coffee
shops must be impolite girls or women, hiding their outings from their par-
ents. No respectable woman would sit in a public place without the company,

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protection, and control of her relatives. Her comments resonated with widely
shared ideas regarding female propriety and mixed-gender socializing outside
the purview of the family (see MacLeod 1991; Ghannam 2002).
Yet many young upper-middle class women live highly mobile and public
lifestyles, outside the purview of the family. The presence of these young
women in both professional and social public life has become normalized,
even critical, to upper-middle class lifestyles, which are marked by the mixed-
gender character of contacts and places. Their presence, however, is a fragile
one, lived out in closed, class-homogeneous spaces, with respectability and
protection being the sine qua non of their ventures into public space. The
emergence of spaces like the coffee shop that are deemed acceptable and re-
spectable for single, marriageable women is crucial to these new routines. But
what creates these coffee shops as safe spaces, and how are their borders
guarded?
Up-market coffee shops are generally seen as safe and respectable places
where upper-middle class Cairenes can engage in mixed-gender socializing.
These coffee shops have created a protected niche for non-familial mixed-
gender sociabilities in the more contentious public geographies of leisure.
They have been able to wrest such mixed-gender sociabilities away from as-
sociations with immorality and loose sexual behavior that cling to less exclu-
sive mixed-gender spaces outside of the redemptive familial sphere.
Comparatively high prices and a minimum charge regulate access to up-
scale coffee shops. These economic controls are often augmented by an entry
policy, which bars those who seem not to belong. The constant fear of attract-
ing those of a lower “social level” is not only based on the importance of
guarding the class markers of a place, but is also stirred by the conviction that
they might not abide by the implicit rules of gendered sociability. Young men
might flirt or harass, overwhelmed by the availability of young women, and
some young women might come to pick up wealthy regulars. These fears e-
cho assumptions about other, less elitist leisure spaces with a mixed-gender
public, which are thought to be market places for easy relationships that in-
volve some kind of exchange of money.
Venues were primarily judged on the “level” of their public and the extent
to which the mixed-gender interactions were assumed to be respectable.
Tamer, a middle class professional in his late twenties, said that he would
never take his fiancée to, for example, the coffee shops located on Gamaacit
id-Duwal Street, a major shopping street and thoroughfare in upscale Mohan-
disseen. He argued, “In these coffee shops, most of the girls are prostitutes. I
can’t go there with my fiancée. Others will think that she is not my fiancée,
but my girlfriend. She will be seen as one of those girls.”
Nihal, an upper-middle class professional in her early thirties, emphasized
the issue of being looked at and the “social level” of those who look. She sum-

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marized the logics of the coffee shop as a safe space as follows: “A place has
to have a certain standard, it shouldn’t be cheap. This guarantees your safety.
It guarantees that our kind of people go. This is crucial with respect to the
image of women in a certain place. If people look at me in a certain place, it is
enough to make me wonder what they say about me. It makes me insecure.”
Karim, also in his early thirties, had similarly given the logics of the coffee
shop a lot of thought. “The ‘ahwa [sidewalk café] does not have a door,” he
said. “Coffee shops, in contrast, are closed. Not every passerby will see you
when you sit there; you do not get influenced by other people. My girlfriend
would not like to sit in a place where she would be seen and would have to
hear comments. She would refuse to sit in the street. She prefers a safely
closed place.”

Figure 2: Trianon, coffee shop on Gamaacit id-Duwal Street, Mohandisseen

(Photo: © Anouk de Koning)

The look or gaze is central to comments and stories about coffee shops. It is a
specific gaze that is viewed as problematic and even harmful: the invasive
look of undeserving men directed at respectable and classy women. Public visi-
bility is a central, yet highly ambiguous trope (cf. Ossman 1994). The essential
question was who could be seen by whom. The recurrent references to “a cer-
tain standard of people” and “our kind of people,” as well as the frequent nega-
tive mention of less classy others, indicate the importance of “social level” with
respect to mixed-gender spaces. “Social level,” which combines notions of

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class and culture, determined the interpretation of specific looks. A look

might be part of an appropriate and desired visibility, or might be harmful and
defiling, depending on “social level.” Not being looked at by certain people
was central to all discussions of coffee shops, and, more generally, movement
through public space.
Besides the gaze, the specter of prostitution is a central theme in these sto-
ries. They reflect a constant concern about the “level” of the female patrons
and the nature of the relationship between men and women in upscale venues.
The specter of prostitution is indicative of the symbolic minefield that these
young women negotiate in Cairo’s public spaces. The core of this ambiguity
consists of the contrastive possible interpretations of a young woman’s pres-
ence in public. Does her presence indicate a disreputable openness to sexual-
ity, or is it part of a more respectable lifestyle and everyday routine?2
Wealth, social origin, and class position guarantee certain interpretations
of a woman’s presence in public. “Social level” was seen as central to a per-
son’s ability to indulge in casual, mixed-gender contact and play with features
that otherwise suggest a lack of respectability. It frames such behaviour as
part of a class-specific respectable normalcy. Similarly, wearing revealing
[ciryaan] clothes need not indicate a lack of respectability, as long as the good
origins of the wearer are beyond doubt. These clothes are then framed as part
of respectable class-specific norms and lifestyles, as much as the stylish
clothing of upper-middle class muhagabbaat [veiled women]. Though class
markers are a crucial part of a person’s embodied performance, the surest way
to avoid confusion and contestation of this sexy-but-respectable self-presentation
is to move in classy places, by way of classy means of transport. Such class
framing defines these women’s public lifestyles and sexy appearances as nor-
mal and respectable.
The gendering of public (and private) spaces and the spatial inflection of
gendered conceptions of propriety present old, yet recurring themes in urban
landscapes (Bondi/Domosh 1998). Coffee shops frame the public presence of
upper-middle class women as appropriate and respectable. By way of their
prices and their explicitly cosmopolitan connections, which signal distance from

2 Elizabeth Wilson’s sketch of the dilemma of the “public woman” in the nine-
teenth-century city highlights some of the central features of this ambiguity. As
Wilson argues, “the prostitute was a ‘public woman,’ but the problem in the
nineteenth-century urban life was whether every woman in the new, disordered
world of the city, the public sphere of pavements, cafes and theatres, was not a
public woman and thus a prostitute. The very presence of unattended-unowned
women constituted a threat both to male power and a temptation to male ‘frailty’”
(Wilson 2001: 74). This ambiguity remains a central theme in numerous settings,
among others in contemporary Cairo. It pervades the ambiguous views of young
middle class women who—apparently unowned—move on their own through
public space.

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surrounding places and their gender norms, coffee shops institute a normalcy
of women’s presence and mixed-gender socializing. The anxiously guarded
mixed-gender nature of the coffee shop allows for the performance of upper-
middle class gendered identities: the leisurely socializing of mixed-gender
groups and the public lifestyles of young career women.
In the streets, where up-market norms are not hegemonic, and a clear class
framing is absent, such self-representations may well be overturned. The same
fashionable cut [sleeveless top] becomes minimally something out of place,
but may also be seen as disreputable and taken to indicate easy morals, an
open invitation to comments and even harassment. A young professional who
was also a frequent visitor of the coffee shop scene told me of his annoyance
with some of his friends. They insisted on harassing women they perceived to
be less-than-respectable. A girl smoking or wearing tight clothes in the streets
would qualify as such in their eyes. “Shame on you!” he reported telling
them, “doesn’t your sister dress just like her?” Such inversions indicate the
extent to which impromptu identifications are framed, and to a large extent
determined, by specific spatial contexts.

Crossing the city

In contrast to the closed coffee shops, the streets are largely characterized by
male entitlement, even if male prerogatives to look at and judge women in
public space can be partially mitigated by recourse to class hierarchies.3
Women, particularly young women who are not accompanied by men, have a
liminal and ambiguous status. They are supposed to be on their way some-
where, have a clear destination, and not linger for too long. Hanging around in
the streets, especially on their own, is taken as an open invitation for men to
make contact. As a consequence, most of my female acquaintances carefully
planned their schedules and meetings to avoid time gaps during which they
would have to spend time waiting in an open public space.
A young woman’s presence in the street is subjected to constant observa-
tion and judgments. Such judgments are based on looks, class markers, and
signs of modesty, such as the higaab [veil] or loose fitting clothing. These
markers are evaluated with respect to possible definitions of a woman’s pres-

3 Streets in up-market areas like Zamalek and Maadi differ significantly from their
lower-class counterparts, as do shopping streets from big thoroughfares and more
residential streets. Despite such significant differences, a dominant male pres-
ence and women’s liminality are shared features of Cairo’s street life. Streets,
moreover, share a certain indeterminacy with respect to class. Some residential
areas constitute marked exceptions to these gendered definitions of the street,
while women peddlers who occupy sidewalks in central streets defy notions of
women’s liminality.

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ANOUK DE KONING

ence in a specific place at a specific time. Different styles of women’s dress

have become central to, and iconic of, different styles of femininity. As Secor
(2002) argues with respect to regimes of veiling in Istanbul, specific attires
allow for certain interpretations and interventions in public space and are
therefore crucial with respect to the micro-politics of interaction in public
spaces.
“Before going out I look ten times in the mirror to check my appearance.
Will this do? Will I be left alone this time?” Nihal told me she would invaria-
bly ask herself these questions before leaving the house in the morning. Many
women told me they ask themselves similar questions, going over the differ-
ent places they would visit and the kind of self-presentation required in them.
Women’s strategies in crossing the city depend on social maps of Cairo that
indicate what to expect in certain places, and mark these places with a sense
of ease and tension, safety and danger.

Figure 3: Two women on Gamaacit id-Duwal Street (Photo: © Anouk de Koning)

Nihal told me of her one-time venture out to a disco that was not clearly
marked as upper-middle class. She felt embarrassed as soon as she entered.
She estimated many of the women present to be easy with regard to sexual
morals and suspected that some might be prostitutes. Despite her self-identifi-

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cation as a proper upper-middle class woman, she felt she was included in this
group of loose women as a result of her mere presence, and felt tainted by the
experience. A number of women told me similar stories, imbued with similar
feelings. Some stressed the social repercussions of being seen in a certain
place, whereas others emphasized their sense of embarrassment or even de-
filement by being identified as less than respectable. This sense of embar-
rassment can be elicited by anything from personal misgivings to subtle signs
of others present, from benevolent teasing and flirting to concrete interven-
tions. A woman may feel the presence of such interpretations because of the
concrete actions of others around her. Such interpretations may, however, also
be attributed to an abstract, imagined public. Regardless, the women to whom
I spoke were all sensitive to such interpretations.
Navigating the city thus requires extensive knowledge of the urban land-
scape. But no such mental map is perfect; one cannot rule out mismatches and
embarrassment by mistaken identifications. Urban life is a process of negotia-
tion and contestation, of indeterminate social interactions with unpredictable
outcomes. Of course, one can try to rule out such mishaps through diverse
preventive measures: going out by car, visiting only those places that are un-
mistakably classy. Such routines depend on the financial means to do so (cf.
Armbrust 1998). For others, “It is a matter of fitting in, of being invisible,” as
Marwa, a middle-class professional in her early thirties, explained. For many
of these women, visibility, or rather invisibility, is a central issue, a feat that
relies on a presentation of the embodied self as respectable and in place. Since
she lived in a working-class area, Marwa had comparatively extensive experi-
ence with a range of urban neighbourhoods. She said that as a muhagabba
[veiled woman] she is able to blend in more easily. However, her veil does
not protect her from flirts and harassment in the streets. “You don’t do any-
thing to look like somebody who can be picked up from the street. How can
you feel safe like that,” she wondered. Many women similarly complained
that there is nothing that will stop men from harassing women in the streets.
Mucaksa [pl. mucaksaat], from “to bother, hassle, annoy,” is mostly used
for encounters with a sexual overtone, and ambiguously denotes anything be-
tween flirt and harassment. The term carries an inbuilt tension: whereas a ‘ya
c
asal’ [hey, honey] in the street can push a woman to step up her pace, a
“charming” compliment in a closed-off, classy place will likely be perceived
quite differently.
Mucaksa is a topic of society-wide debate and is experienced as a major
nuisance and deterrent to women’s ventures into public space (cf. Ghannam
2002: 100; MacLeod 1991: 63). For those living in the closed-off places of
up-market districts, mucaksa comes to symbolize the streets tout court. They
have never learned, have forgotten, or are no longer willing to adapt to the
Cairene streets, or to try to be invisible. As Marwa commented, “You get used

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to your privacy, comfort and being free from harassment. You then find it
difficult to adapt once more to a certain attitude, to step down.” Many of those
not willing or able to be invisible avoid the streets if they can. The question is:
Who can afford to do so?

Transport and the mobile framing of class

Purity and defilement are central issues with respect to women’s movement in
public space. An improper gaze can constitute injury to the upper-middle class
female body. The avoidance and barring of unwanted gazes are crucial upper-
middle class strategies in moving through public space. A woman should not
get tired, should be at ease and free of the unwanted touches of other bodies.
Two common means of transport have come to symbolize the two extremes
of experiences in public space: while the car represents control, protection, and
absolute freedom, the public bus has come to stand for forced proximity and
possible harassment. Whereas a man might brave these nuisances, a woman
should never be forced to undergo the horrors of crowdedness in an open yet
closed space like the public bus, where one is condemned to the proximity of
others and their unclean bodies, and, worst of all, physical harassment.
Cairo is generally seen as relatively safe, yet fears of sexual violence, es-
pecially rape, were commonplace. Stories of harassment in public transport
abounded. When the subject of public transport came up, so did stories of the
dangers of the mini- or microbus, which invariably featured men waiting to
harass women moving on their own. Concerns about women’s movement
centrally focus on their unscathed passage through public space. Whereas
rape is the ultimate desecration, even a look can harm and defile the pure, un-
sullied, and properly sexualized female body.
The need to take public transport or move by foot in the streets exposes
upper-middle class women to infringements on their established routines and
preferred lifestyles. Hoda commented that she had to change her way of
dressing when she moved house after her marriage. Now that she is taking a
taxi from home to the metro station located in a popular neighborhood, she
has stopped wearing tight clothes and obvious make-up to avoid being too
visible and thus warranting comments. “You cannot wear professional clothes,
such as a skirt, unless you have a car,” she said. She complained that she is
therefore no longer able to live up to the image of the professional career
woman she would like to present. For many middle-class women who can,
and even those who cannot afford it, the car has become an indispensable
item. The car allows them to dress the way they like and protects them from
unwanted encounters. It allows them to be bi-rahithum, at ease. The next best
thing is the taxi, a favourite, but expensive option for many non-car owners.

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In contrast to the stories of danger and defilement that surround public

transport, the car thus becomes the symbol for and guarantor of a perfect
world of professional life, self-representation, and respectable socializing. It
provides a mobile framing of the self that confirms a certain class standing,
akin to the fixed spatial framing of the up-market coffee shop. As a man in his
early thirties remarked, “A woman who takes a taxi still has a relation to the
street. She will eventually return to the street and can therefore be flirted with.
A woman with her own car can dress in whatever way she likes. Nobody will
harass her.” The public lifestyles of young upper-middle class women depend
on the financial means to sit in certain places and to take certain modes of
transport—in short, to move exclusively in up-market Cairo. The car crowns
attempts to create a controlled environment. It transports women unscathed
and free of unwanted interventions from one safe space to the next.
Nihal sketched her paramount image of the young upper class woman:
driving a Cherokee with closed, tinted windows, air-conditioning on, moving
between different places dominated by her own norms of respectability and
sociability. This image rings quite true. The ability of many upper-middle
class women to engage in their preferred lifestyle and specific modes of so-
ciability and self-presentation depends on such class closure and control over
their environment.
Moving around with these female professionals, the map of Cairo seems
to shrink to include only those areas where their distinctive lifestyles are the
norm: the up-market districts of Mohandisseen, Zamalek, Maadi, and Helio-
polis. For some, spaces outside of this class-specific economy seem a vague
and distant reality. These other spaces are marked as dirty, full of bacteria and
health hazards, uncouth people, and mucaksaat. Some of these spaces outside
up-market Cairo, like the “popular” or “informal” housing sectors (cash-
waa’iyyaat) (cf. Bayat/Denis 2000), are places never to be visited, unless by
accident when one gets lost and is stranded in a popular area like Dar es-
Salaam, full of unknown but lurking dangers.

Perf ormi ng fragile identiti es

[The daughters of the high aristocracy] dreamt solely of a regular sojourn abroad, lived sur-
rounded by electronic gadgets and refused to go out into the streets, afraid that the contact
with all those poor drifting about the sidewalks would defile them. They would only go out
by car, and then exclusively to closed establishments: restaurants, cinemas or beaches where
they could be sure they wouldn’t encounter any plebs.
They were right. Wherever they went, the atmosphere grew tense. Their beauty was almost
impermissible. Even if the girls laughed very modestly, it looked like a provocation. When
they pushed up their hair, the gesture would become erotically charged. The pointed breasts
under their shirts inflicted more chaos than a machine gun. Their transparent cheeks seemed
made to be kissed. Rachid Mimouni (1991: 88; my translation)

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This passage is taken from Une peine à vivre, a novel about the life of a dicta-
tor in an unnamed country by the Algerian writer Rachid Mimouni. It de-
scribes the lives of women in a far more privileged position than the women
whose trajectories have informed this paper. Yet it sketches a similar ironic
situation in which elite fears and anxieties that surround less exclusive places
and their inhabitants combine with the segmented everyday realities of a di-
vided city. Elite norms increasingly clash with those of other city dwellers,
thereby confirming the impossibility of “going out in the streets.” As Mi-
mouni writes, they were right not to go out into the streets. Even the simplest
gesture could be “misread,” creating confusion, inciting harassment and the
defilement of otherwise pure and respectable embodiments of upper-middle
class femininity.
Social avoidance and segregation are widespread phenomena in Cairo’s
socio-cultural landscape. The itineraries of these women highlight the every-
day existence of social distance and segregation within the urban landscape
and the fabric of city life. These are the footsteps of social segregation that
play out against the more obvious maps of privilege and affluence and exclu-
sion and poverty inscribed in the built environment, most markedly in the
form of the gated communities that now surround Cairo. Their urban trajecto-
ries show the existence of specific upper-middle class norms of gendered pro-
priety in public space, which are secured through the social closure of up-
market spaces.
While their class status gives them a certain leverage vis-à-vis the male
entitlement in the streets, most upper-middle class women I knew preferred to
resort to the more reliable strategies of class closure to secure their unscathed
passage through such open public spaces. Their trajectories were invariably
based on class maps. It is only in exclusive up-market places that they can be
at ease and dress and socialize as they see fit without being annoyed or being
seen as disreputable. This points to what seems to me to be a crucial contra-
diction at the core of these high-mobility and rather public routines: their con-
dition of possibility is social closure, the avoidance of any disturbance and the
ability to avoid any unwanted contacts.
In the context of her discussion of exclusive urban developments in Sao
Paulo, Teresa Caldeira argues that the tendency to spatialize social distance is
connected to “the inability [of more privileged inhabitants] to impose their
own code of behaviour – including rules of deference – onto the city” (2000:
319). Gender is an integral part of the drawing of class boundaries and justifi-
cations of social segregation in Cairo. These women’s everyday routines and
lifestyles are predicated on class closure, which keeps other codes and norms
regarding public sociability and propriety at bay. Arguments about gendered
behavior, and the need for the protection of “classy” women in turn, come to
legitimize such social segregation. Many of the women featured in this paper

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were concerned about harassment and those even worse things that might
happen in public spaces that were not explicitly marked as upper-middle class
and appropriate or safe for women. These fears concern non-upper-middle
class public spaces and tend to have strong implicit or explicit classist under-
tones. They concern upper-middle class women and the mass of lower class
men of whom they must be aware.
The diverse attempts at closure discussed here must be located against the
background of growing class differences and a larger trend towards social
segregation in Cairo’s urban landscape (cf. de Koning 2005). In Egypt’s new
liberal age, the city is being transformed through seemingly unbound private-
sector initiative in combination with government attempts to bring the country
up to speed with the global. New forms of class closure are a main component
of these new urban developments. Parallel to developments in other major
cities around the world, Cairo has witnessed a flurry in the building of gated
communities (in local terms: compounds) in the desert, providing members of
the upper (middle) class with pollution-free, exclusive, and prestigious hous-
ing. Next to these compounds, private hospitals, language schools, and uni-
versities have sprung up, which advertise American or British standards,
teaching methods and curricula, and grant degrees that are only partly valid in
the Egyptian context. The recently completed network of fly-over bridges,
tunnels, and highways that connects different up-market areas of Cairo allows
one to move from one part of this “other Egypt” to the next, without having to
descend into some of Cairo’s less palatable realities.

Re f e r e n c e s

Armbrust, Walter (1998) “When the Lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as

Secular Ritual”. Visual Anthropology 10/2-4, pp. 413–442.
Bayat, Asef/Denis, Eric (2000) “Who is afraid of ashwaiyyat”. Environment
& Urbanization 12/2, pp. 185–199.
Bondi, Liz/Domosh, Mona (1998) “On the contours of public space: A tale of
three women”. Antipode 30/3, pp. 270–289.
Caldeira, Teresa P.R. (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizen-
ship in Sao Paulo, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Denis, Eric (1997) “Urban Planning and Growth in Cairo”. Middle East Re-
port, Winter 1997, pp. 7–12.
Fernandes, Leela (2000) “Restructuring the new middle class in liberalizing
India”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 20,
pp. 88–104.

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Ghannam, Farha (2002) Remaking the Modern in a Global Cairo: Space, Re-
location, and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Koning, Anouk de (2005) Global Dreams: Space, Class and Gender in Mid-
dle Class Cairo. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam.
MacLeod, Arlene Elowe (1991) Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the
New Veiling, and Change in Cairo, New York: Columbia University Press.
Mimouni, Rachid (1992) Straf voor het leven, Amsterdam: Maarten
Muntinga. Translation of Une peine à vivre [1991].
Ossman, Susan (1994) Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern
City, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Secor, Anne J. (2002) “The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: women’s dress,
mobility and Islamic knowledge”. Gender, Place and Culture 9/1, pp. 5–22.
Wilson, Elizabeth (2001) The Contradictions of Culture: Cities: Culture:
Women, London: Sage.

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N eg o t iatin g Pu b li c Sp ac e s: T h e R ig h t t o t h e
Gend ered City and the R ight to Differenc e

TOVI FENSTER

Negotiating public spaces has become part of everyday life in globalized ur-
ban spaces where individuals and communities of different ethnicities, races,
cultural backgrounds, or religious orientations struggle for territorial con-
trol. The paper illustrates a conflict entailing the denial of the right to use of
secular women living in Jerusalem of certain public spaces in the city in the
name of the right to difference of the ultra-orthodox community living in Mea
Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem.1

Negotiating public spaces has become part of the realities of everyday life in
globalized urban spaces. It is connected to the politics of identity and consists
of the struggles for territorial control between individuals and communities of
different ethnicities, races, cultural backgrounds or religious orientations.
Conflicts over the use of public spaces also occur between communities and
institutions, which for their part sometimes assume the role of “negotiators”—
with varying degrees of success. In recent decades, negotiations on the use of
urban spaces have become even more discursive with the acknowledgment of
the Lefèbvrian notion of the right to the city side by side with its daily denial
because of security considerations, feelings of fear (especially from what is
termed “the other”), religious norms, cultural values, and economic interests.
This results in a situation where globalized cities are less accessible to the
“public” than they were before, and everyday negotiations on the use of pub-
lic space are becoming part of the routine life of city inhabitants.

1 For an elaborated version of this paper, see Fenster 2005, Fenster (forthcoming).

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TOVI FENSTER

This paper illustrates one particular case of urban conflict and everyday
negotiations over the use of public spaces. In this particular case the urban
conflict entails the denial of the right to use of secular women living in Jeru-
salem of certain public spaces in the city in the name of the right to difference
of the ultra-orthodox community living in Mea Shearim neighborhood. Here
the conflict focuses on gender and religious identities because the denial of
the right to use is practiced against women since it entails codes of modesty
and clothing. The conflict also involves the religious identity of the ultra-
orthodox community, for whom the practice of the Lefèbvrian right to use of
public spaces in their neighborhood contradicts their basic beliefs and norms
of women’s modesty. This situation illustrates the discourse around Lefèb-
vre’s (1991a; 1991b) terminology of the right to the city and the right to dif-
ference and the conflicts between universal citizenship—expressed in the
right of the city—and the group’s right to difference (Young 1998). In addi-
tion, the paper discusses the role of institutionalized forms, in this case, the
Jerusalem Municipality, which is the sovereign and has the responsibility for
ensuring that the right to use public spaces of its citizens is maintained.
Despite the fact that this is a very unique and specific case, it reflects the
nature of women’s and men’s everyday life realities and experiences in many
cities around the globe when they have to negotiate their right in the city, a
right which is denied in the name of religious or cultural norms, fear, security,
or economic interests.

The individual right to the city

What is the Lefèbvrian notion of the “right to the city?” The right to the city
(Lefèbvre 1991a; 1991b) asserts a normative rather than a juridical right
based on inhabitance. Those who inhabit the city have a right to the city. It is
earned by living in the city and it is shared between the urban dweller and the
citizen. This concept of a right to the city evolves within itself two main rights
(Purcell 2003): the right to appropriate urban space in the sense of the right to
use, the right of inhabitants to “full and complete use” of urban space in their
everyday lives. It is the right to live in, play in, work in, represent, character-
ize, and occupy urban space in a particular city—the right to be an author of
urban space. It’s a creative product of, and context for, the everyday life of its
inhabitants. The second component of the right to the city is the right to par-
ticipation. The rights of inhabitants to take a central role in decision-making
surrounding the production of urban space at any scale, whether it is the state,
capital, or any other entity that takes part in the production of urban space.
Many academic works have incorporated the notion of the right to the city
in their analysis of urban everyday life (Kofman 1995; Kofman/Labas 1996;

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Dikec 2001; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2003; Yacobi 2003; Cuthbert 1995; Fen-
ster 2004). This analysis is usually integrated in the discussion of new forms
of citizenship that challenge the traditional, hegemonic, nation-state forms of
this notion. These new forms of citizenship refer not only to the legal status of
citizens provided them by the state but also to membership and belonging
within a community and the tactics and practices to claim citizen rights. Citi-
zenship is viewed as continuously negotiated through everyday practices
(Secor 2004). These new forms of citizenship challenge capitalist power rela-
tions and their increased control over social life (Purcell 2003). They also
challenge the static “top down” analysis of citizenship and present an ap-
proach to citizenship as spatial strategy, which includes certain definitions of
belonging, identity, and rights (Secor 2004). As Purcell (2003) indicates,
these processes entail rescaling, reterritorializing, and reorienting of both
economy and forms of citizenships. In this context of political and economic
restructuring, the Lefèbvrian construction and meanings of “the right to the
city” can be interpreted as a form of resistance to traditional structures of citi-
zenship. It is a normative phrasing of citizenship and its resisting nature be-
gins with the fact that the right to the city is based on inhabitance, that is,
those who inhabit the city have the right to the city as opposed to other forms
of membership that are determined by nation-state citizenship. The right to
the city or the right to urban life, which is based on inhabitance, entails two
main rights: “the right to appropriate” urban space or “the right to use” urban
space and “the right to participate” in the production of urban space (Purcell
2003). As already mentioned, these normative rights encompass not only
rights to resources but also the right to be the author of urban space, the right
to belong in the city and to contribute to its creation.
The denial of the right to use certain urban spaces in Jerusalem and at the
same time the spatial expression of the right to difference come from the fact
that the ultra-orthodox community has determined or defined different con-
ceptions of the boundaries between the “permitted” and the “forbidden,”
conceptions which reflect their own religious beliefs. They have established
what they term “modesty walls” expressed in large signs hung at the two main
entrances to the neighborhood in the Mea Shearim Street and also in entrances
to the small alleys and shops located within the neighborhood. These signs
pose a clear request in Hebrew and English. Sometimes the message in He-
brew and English is similar, sometimes it is slightly different: Please do not
pass our neighborhood in immodest clothes.
The signs also specify the exact meaning of modest clothing: Modest
clothes include: closed blouse with long sleeves, long skirt, no trousers, no
tight-fitting clothes.
These specifications do not leave any room for individual interpretations
as to what the meaning of “modest” is, as it is culturally constructed. And

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thus, there are very detailed specifications related to the appropriate ways to
cover all parts of women’s bodies.
Secular women living in Jerusalem find this restriction to be a denial of
their right to use urban spaces and as a conduct that forces them to negotiate
their use of public spaces with appropriate dress. In a study carried out in Je-
rusalem (Fenster 2004), women talked about this neighborhood as a public
space in which they feel discomfort and where they need to prepare in ad-
vance in terms of their clothing when they want to cross this neighborhood.
For secular women living in Jerusalem, no matter what their nationality, eth-
nicity, or religious identity, certain urban spaces represent conflict and thus a
cause for discomfort because of their dress. Obviously, tensions within multi-
religious communities exist in many other cities (Naylor/Ryan 1998), and
sometimes these tensions have effects on women’s movement in urban spaces
(Secor 2002). However, this discourse represents a more complicated situa-
tion, which is becoming more and more significant in multicultural cities
around the world, of constant negotiations of using public spaces when sac-
ralization of space, in this case, denies individual rights of secular women to
the city, but it reflects the group right to difference claimed by the ultra-
orthodox.

The group right to difference

The group right to difference also has its spatial expression, as we have al-
ready mentioned, with the signs asking women not to cross the neighborhood
with “immodest” clothing. But this expression of the right to difference has a
historical background. Mea Shearim was already established in 1874 as a seg-
regated neighborhood for ultra-orthodox people who wished to maintain their
religious norms and beliefs—separated from the majority of the population
(Ben Arie 1979). In the mid-19th century this neighborhood was indeed very
isolated from the city center, which at that period consisted of the old city of
Jerusalem, but as the city expanded and grew the neighborhood became part
of the city and is now even located near the current city center, a fact that
makes “the publicity” of the neighborhood more explicit and the use of its
streets more frequent for the general public than before.
This practice of spatial segregation, which reflects their desire for differ-
ence, exists in many other ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in different
cities around the world. Even today, ultra-orthodox communities usually
choose distant sites as their preferred locations. For example, Kiryat Joel, a

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Satmer2 town in New York State, was established in the 1970s at a distance of
70 km from the city center, to protect the residents from “external influences”
and to allow the children to grow up with no drug and crime influence (Mintz
1994).
It can be argued that the right to difference of the Mea Shearim residents
is historical and had been a principle of their everyday life from its construc-
tion. The roots of this need and claim of sacredness or “difference” of their
neighborhood is based on their belief of the sacredness of the Land of Israel
as the promised Biblical land. This holiness necessitates practices of modesty
and dress not only by ultra-orthodox women but also by secular women as
well because women’s modesty is a very basic rule in the religious Jewish
lifestyle (Shilav 2004). These practices can be seen as symbolic “border
guards” that help to identify people as members or non-members of the com-
munity. Women’s dress is often one of the major signifiers of such border
constructions (Yuval-Davis 2000). Women’s dress (Muslim or Jewish) indi-
cates the body and its covering as expressions of dominant ideologies and
representations either of “Muslim women” (Dwyer 1998) or “Jewish women”
and also as sites of contested cultural representations.
Thus one interpretation of these signs is that they demonstrate the gated
nature of the neighborhood with “modesty gates,” or as its residents phrase it:
“modesty walls.” These “walls” construct the boundaries of the religious and
cultural identities of its residents and transform its main streets into sacred
spaces, which in fact exclude secular women who do not follow the strict
rules of clothing and mixed-gendered groups who disobey practices of mod-
esty and impurity. However, such signs can also be interpreted as part of the
politics of identity of the community, which struggles against “intolerance of
difference” in modernity (Kong 2001).In this regard, these signs express the
“right to difference” of ultra-orthodox women themselves who feel more com-
fortable in such a “gated” space in which their own modest dress is a norm
rather than an exception, as they feel in other secular public spaces in Jerusa-
lem (Fenster 2004).
From the point of view of the right to difference, these signs serve as a de-
fense against “inappropriate” dress and lifestyle which contradict the group’s
norms and standards of behavior. Such a construction of public spaces as sa-
cred is contested in any case (Kong 2001), mainly because sacred is a “con-
tested category,” as it represents “hierarchical power relations of domination
and subordination, inclusion and exclusion, appropriation and dispossession”

2 Satmar is one of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish groups that live in Orange
County, near New York. Hasidim are the followers of an 18th-century pietistic
movement. The major Hasidic groups include: Belz, Bobov, Ger, Lubavitch, and
Satmar. Their names typically derive from their town of origin. Each group is led
by a religious leader (a rebbe) (cf. Valins 2003; Mintz 1994).

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TOVI FENSTER

(Chidester/Linenthal 1995: 17; Kong 2001). A sacred place is constructed by

appropriation of property, politics of exclusion, maintaining boundaries, and
distancing the inside from the outside (Kong 2001). As Sibley (1995; 1999)
mentions, forms and norms of exclusion are not only the practices of the ma-
jority against the minority but also the practices of the minority against the
majority—as the case of Mea Shearim indicates.
Moving the discussion to group identity and rights, can we discuss the
right to difference of the ultra orthodox as a group right and the practices of
“modesty walls” as its expressions? In other words, is the “group” unit, rather
than the individual, a valid component in the discussion of the right to differ-
ence? Young (1998) asserts the political importance of the concept “social
group” as the unit, which motivates and mobilizes social movements such as
the women’s movement, the gay movement, or elder’s movements more than
exclusively class or economic interests. However, she claims that group iden-
tity should be understood in relational terms, and, although social processes of
affinity and separation define groups, they do not always give groups a sub-
stantive identity, because each of the group members possess multiple identi-
ties besides the “group identity”: “There is no common nature that members
of a group have,” she argues (1998: 273). However, she argues that the inclu-
sion and participation of everyone in social and political institutions some-
times requires the articulation of “special rights” that meet the needs of a
group’s difference. Here she mainly refers to “oppressed groups,” such as
women, gay communities, elderly people, or in general groups who suffer
from exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and
violence and harassment. Can such conditions be related to the position of the
ultra orthodox in Jerusalem? Perhaps so in their eyes, but some would argue
that these terminologies of group oppression better apply to secular women.
Kymlicka’s (1998) definition of “religious sects” as groups that demand ex-
emption from civil society because its norms contradict some of the groups’
religious practices, can be useful in this discussion. Sometimes, he argues,
these demands for exemption are indeed a form of withdrawal from the larger
society, but some of them show a desire for integration. For example,
Kimlicka (1998) says, Orthodox Jews wanted to join the US military, but
needed an exemption from the usual regulations so that they could wear their
yarmulkes. This practice can be seen as an example of a group right to differ-
ence, which expresses a will to integrate in civil life and duties. Following
this line of thinking, can we then interpret the “modesty walls” as an expres-
sion of the ultra-orthodox’s desire to integrate in the sense that these “walls”
are more symbolic than physical, or is this a struggle against the intolerance
of the modernized secular, with women’s modesty practices the price paid for
this struggle?

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 NEGOTIATING PUBLIC SPACES

The role of governance in negotiating

urban conflicts

What is the role of local governance in negotiating or solving urban conflicts?

In other words, how do municipalities act in their policies between the Lefèb-
vrian standpoint of the right to the city and the group right to difference? In
the former case municipalities should prohibit practices such as “modesty
walls” in the city as they deny the “right to use” of women in the city. In the lat-
ter, municipalities could argue that this practice expresses the group’s identity
in maintaining privatized public spaces as sacred that should be respected,
especially in an era when the Lefèbvrian right to the city is denied in the name
of security, for example.
Relating to this discourse between the right to the city and the right to dif-
ference, Benvenisti (1998) argues that the claim for religious autonomy or the
sacralization of space is justified only if it does not contradict fundamental
norms and state legislation. As he argues, the formulation of such a “religious
ghetto” is acceptable as long as it is based on cultural and religious preserva-
tion principles and heritage necessity. This is the case of the ultra-orthodox,
Benvenisti argues, as much as the claims of the Aboriginals in Australia and
the First Nations in Canada and the Sami in Scandinavia to maintain their tra-
ditional life. The only problem Benvenisti sees is in the fact that such norms,
which create exclusion, can harm women’s rights. The solution Benvenisti
suggests is to allow such principles of autonomy of these communities to take
place, but without offending the rights of the majority. Similar debates have
been discussed elsewhere (Fenster 1999a; 1999b) regarding planning proce-
dures for ethnic groups such as the Bedouin in the Negev. There the particu-
laristic cultural-religious identity of the male Bedouin perpetuates women’s
subordination by dictating norms of modesty and seclusion. Modernist-
professional planning, which is intolerant to such identity-related issues, actu-
ally designs Bedouin towns in such a way that women cannot use public
spaces because of the danger that their modesty may be abused in the eyes of
the males. These principles enhance the chances of unwanted meetings be-
tween women and men of different tribes and threaten women’s modesty
(Fenster 1999a; 1999b).
In other cities in Israel, such as Tel Aviv, certain neighborhoods are popu-
lated by ultra-orthodox communities, but with no explicit exclusionary signs.
There are similar signs in the city of Benei Brak for example, a city with
mostly religious3 residents, but these signs are less offensive and perhaps less
exclusionary. Shilav (1997) analyzes the management of ultra-orthodox cities

3 As mentioned above, the ultra-orthodox, as well as other religious groups in Is-

rael, are not homogeneous, and each represents a different degree of tolerance
towards secular groups.

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TOVI FENSTER

in Israel relating to the extent to which the ultra-orthodox communities them-

selves are flexible or tolerant to the “other”—mostly secular groups or people
with less rigid religious practices living with them.
Practices of sacralization of public spaces are also not known in cities out-
side Israel where ultra-orthodox communities live, such as in the USA, Can-
ada, and Britain. This is perhaps because they live in isolated areas anyway
and do not need to protect themselves from outside “negative” influence (Valins
2003).
In Jerusalem the role of the municipality in negotiating urban conflict is
different. In order to understand this, I talked to the Chief of the City Enforce-
ment Department at the Jerusalem Municipality, a department which deals
with enforcing municipal bylaws, including those concerning licensing for
street signs and businesses. I asked him about the legality of the signs hung up
in the streets of Mea Shearim. He stated that in general the municipality is
very rigid in enforcing municipal bylaws by imposing licensing for street
signs and businesses. But in Mea Shearim, he said, this is different. Although
the signs there are illegal, as they were not approved and licensed by the mu-
nicipality, the municipality’s workers cannot enforce the law. The Chief of
the City Enforcement Department defined this area as “outside the law and
outside enforcing the law” (interview, 20 July 2003). He explains that the dif-
ficulty in enforcing this bylaw in Mea Shearim is due to lack of enough labor
power. He says: “Even if we take down these signs they will put them up
again.” This, in fact, reflects the struggle of the ultra-orthodox group to estab-
lish its politics of identity and community by challenging the sovereignty of
the municipality, and perhaps its “intolerance to difference.” It also expresses
the fact that the Mea Shearim group does not recognize the sovereignty of the
municipality. But this is probably also an expression of the municipality’s
implicit politics of not interfering with these practices, probably because of
local politics and power relations within the municipality’s council. The Chief
of the City Enforcement Department admits that if such signs restricting
movement had appeared in secular neighborhoods, the municipality would
have reacted forcefully against this practice. Thus, in spite of their illegitimate
status, these signs still hang in public spaces, transforming the neighborhood
into a gated one.

Co n c l u s i o n s

This paper illustrates how everyday life in urban spaces today entails negotia-
tions over the use of public space. It also highlights the frequent clashes be-
tween different sets of rights: the individual right to the city and the group
right to difference in this case. The paper suggests that these apparent clashes

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between identity rights are becoming part and parcel of everyday realities in
globalized urban spaces.
The case of Mea Shearim represents an extreme example of an ultra-
orthodox community, which, because of its desire to maintain “pure” and “sa-
cred” ghettoized spaces, acts illegally by constructing symbolic gates at the
entrances to the neighborhood, thus denying the right to use of secular women
in Jerusalem.
The paper also illustrates the rather sensitive and complicated situations of
local governance and municipalities, which sometimes find themselves as
“negotiators” or even moderators of urban conflicts. The Jerusalem munici-
pality does not take this standpoint, and its attitude reflects a dilemma be-
tween various sets of rights more than reflecting a clear-cut policy.
The paper does not suggest a solution but aims to expose the multiple im-
plications of such situations. A feminist’s first reaction to such exclusionary
practices in the city might be negative, but discussing such issues in depth
reveals the different meanings and implications of such situations that forces
one to deal with sometimes contradictory meanings of the right to the city and
the contrast inherent between them, a situation which becomes more and more
apparent in multi-ethnicized, multi-sacralized and multi-nationalized global
urban spaces. Such dilemmas will be part of city governance’s daily occupa-
tion, as diversity becomes an increasingly important issue in new global
spaces. One of the major challenges of city governance is how to respect both
individual and group rights while maintaining women’s and other groups’
rights to freedom of movement in the city.

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On t he R o ad t o B eing W hit e:
The Constru ction of Whit ene ss in the Ev er yda y
Life of E xpatri ate Ger man H i gh Fly ers
in Sing apore and London

LARS MEIER

Based on ethnographic field studies of the everyday life of German profes-

sionals working in the financial sector in London and Singapore, I describe
the construction of whiteness as an everyday process in interaction with the
specific city. The article shows that even the everyday life of the so-called
global elite is strongly bound to particular structures and to their images of
the city and the “other,” brought in as part of the expatriates’ travel bag-
gage.

Introduction

Ethnicity should not only be seen as a system that socially classifies the non-
white and that is in consequence a powerful system of social subordination. It
is also, in the case of whiteness, a system which inscribes social privileges,
privileges which are constructed and reproduced in the everyday practices of
“white people” and in the everyday construction of self and otherness.
The aim of my article is to make visible the continuous construction of
whiteness in interaction with each specific city and, subsequently, to oppose
naturalization of whiteness as the norm by denying its validity as an attribute
of social classification. “As long as race is something only applied to non-
white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named,

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LARS MEIER

they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just peo-
ple” (Dyer 2001: 1).
Postcolonial studies show that the durable colonial discourse defined the
“others’” culture and geography as primitive or as a stereotypical Orient (cf.
Said 1978; Fanon 1967). The colonial division of the “West and the Rest” (cf.
Hall 1994) neglects internal differences and divides the world into two homo-
geneous blocks: “The West” is imaged as modern, developed, civilised and
central. “The Rest” on the other hand is imaged as a premodern, undeveloped,
and uncivilised periphery. In the meaning of “the West and the Rest,” the Ori-
ent is not just “there,” it is part of the “here”; it is part of the European imagi-
nation (cf. Said 1978). The imagination of the “other” and the construction of
white identity are historically based (cf. Lambert 2005; Bonnett 2000) and
continually produced/reproduced in current everyday action. Thus, being
white is a result of learning to be white and to image the other (cf. Franken-
berg 1993; Thandeka 1999). Part of learning to be white is to learn the spe-
cific places of the whites (cf. Frankenberg 1993). The inscription of meaning
in places is intertwined with identities: one’s own place and own identity or
the foreign place and the foreign identity are bounded concepts. Identities and
meanings are socially constructed; this applies to social groups just as it does
to the inscription of meanings in places and landscapes (cf. Said 1978,
Duncan/Duncan 1988).
By conceptualizing the finance milieu as a travelling culture (cf. Clifford
1997), this article will analyse everyday life not only at a fixed, local level.
Following the routes, different places and travel between these places come
into the focus of the analysis.
The everyday action of expatriates is conceptualised as a wider activity; it
is also fed by practices, assumptions, and images that are learned in distant
places, such as in Germany. Limiting the analysis of everyday life to the local
level loses the importance of images for local everyday action. I argue that
German professionals bring their learned images into Singapore and London
and reproduce them in their specific everyday action. Images are part of their
travel baggage, which has been packed in distant places and times. Part of this
baggage is the construction of whiteness.1

My paper is based on ethnographic field studies of the everyday life of the so-
called global or transnational elite (cf. Sklair 2001, Castells 1996, Beaver-
stock 2001), taking the example of German employees in the financial sector
of two major international financial centres, London and Singapore. By locat-

1 In this article I focus on the identity formation of whiteness. Other identities,

such as gender (cf. Frankenberg 1993) and class/milieu identities (cf. Roediger
1992), shine through the construction of whiteness; but they will not be explicitly
discussed here.

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 ON THE ROAD TO BEING WHITE

ing the research project in the same milieu in two cities, it is possible to ana-
lyse the construction of whiteness in dependence on the structures of the spe-
cific city. Following Anthony King (cf. King 1990), I situate the cities in con-
tinuity with their past: On the one hand, London as the former core metropolis
of the British Empire (or “The Imperial City”), in which whiteness has its ori-
gin. On the other hand, Singapore as a former British-colonized city (or “The
Colonial City”), in which whiteness is a category connected with the traveller,
the businessman, and the colonizer. I will look into the effects of their histo-
ries as Colonial or Imperial cities regarding the contemporary everyday be-
haviour of white finance employees. My focus is mainly on the construction
of whiteness in Singapore, but at the end of my paper I will contrast some of
the central findings with my findings on the construction of whiteness in Lon-
don.
By interviewing employees of the financial sector and investigating the
places which they use, I had the opportunity to observe the everyday life of
white Germans and their interaction with specific places in each specific city.
My research project is based on 19 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with
German employees working in the financial sector in London, as well as on
19 interviews with the same social group working in Singapore. In addition to
the interviews, I was able to make field notes on participant observations by
joining my interviewees in restaurants, cafes, or bars, visiting their homes,
meeting them in their workplace, or simply joining them in driving or walking
around the city. Investigations of the places in which my interviewees live,
work, or engage in leisure activities contributed to the empirical basis of my
investigation.
I will follow two lines of argument: First, I will argue that the production
of whiteness is not a universal experience. Whiteness has to be created in eve-
ryday life in dependence on specific structures of the particular city and on
specific images brought in from Germany. Second, I will show that the pro-
duction of whiteness in each city does not take place only in segregated quar-
ters of the city. It is also produced on the everyday level in small spatial inter-
actions between self and others in a seemingly homogenous city quarter.

Becoming White in Singapore

After an interview with a male German banker who has been living in Asia
for more than 15 years, I had the opportunity to see where he lives in Singa-
pore. The field notes from our travel through “his” Singapore will illustrate
my central line of argument.
By following me and my interviewee travelling around “his” Singapore, it
is possible to learn something about the construction of whiteness in Singa-

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LARS MEIER

pore. But the reader should be aware: Actively reading and following his
route means following one’s own route. Beyond seeing the process of being
white for the German finance employee, a white reader will find some of his
or her own images. Non-whites considering that “the subaltern cannot speak”
(cf. Spivak 1988) are also part and reproducers alike of this powerful dis-
course.
At several points I will interrupt this example by examining central find-
ings with the help of passages from other interviews. To avoid confusion,
these interruptions are marked in front of the sequence by assigned codes for
different interviewees (e.g. S 5).

We start at my interviewee’s workplace, in an aluminium-faced building. En-

tering the building one feels the comfortable air-conditioned coolness. Behind
the information desk in the entrance hall stands a dark-skinned man (perhaps,
according to Singaporean categories, a Malay) with a dark blue suit, who
shows me the entrance to the bank institute.

Ethnic division of labour in which the employed whites are always in top positions
There is an omnipresent ethnic division of labour in Singapore. Essentially all employed
whites in Singapore always work as “foreign talents” in qualified work in the developed
service sector. My interviewees find themselves to be desired and required by Singaporean
society as highly qualified personnel. One mentioned that even the president of Singapore
remarked that Singaporean society depends on the knowledge of the expatriates. My inter-
viewees explain this by associating whiteness with creativity, informality, and independ-
ence, and contrasting this with an ascription of Singaporeans as uncreative and dependent.
S10: “The people here are so obsessed by what they are fed three or four times every day by
the newspapers, the government and so on. This makes them mostly dependent. They cannot
do anything on their own. Everything is orderly.”

After a short wait, my interviewee welcomes me and invites me into his of-
fice. He is in his fifties, has a fit figure with short-cut grey hair and is wearing
black trousers, a lilac shirt and a lilac tie, but no suit.
Following my former experiences with the well-dressed German finance
employees in London, I had prepared myself to enter the world of the finance
employees in Singapore by changing my usual clothing style to wearing black
shoes, an ironed long-sleeve shirt, and a suit for the interviews. But after en-
tering the field in Singapore I changed this style, because my interviewees,
wearing polo-shirts without jacket or tie, were—to my surprise—mostly dressed
more casually than I was.

Differentiation and group formation is based on whiteness, not on clothes

Usually, special clothes are a form of everyday differentiation from the other (cf. Bourdieu
1987). For the German finance employees in Singapore there is less need to differentiate by
clothes, as the difference through their whiteness is so obvious and equivalent to the distinc-
tion by clothes. The two following interview sequences underline this argument:

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S6: “I must say that here in Singapore you don’t wear a collar, a tie, and a suit every day
like in Germany, the demand is not strong like it is in Germany. I wear casual clothes, with
the exception of when there is something special like a ceremony, then I will wear collar
and tie, but there is normally no need for a jacket.”
S10: “If I am leaving for home after work, then I take off the tie and put it there into the
drawer [he opens the drawer with different ties in it]. I have five others there and tomorrow
morning I’ll choose one for wearing. In the evening I don’t go home with a tie, there is no-
body who knows me outside and if there was somebody who knows me, it would be all the
same to me (he laughs).”

After the interview we go to the underground car park and get into a large,
immaculate, silver-coloured Mercedes Benz. On starting the engine, the air-
conditioning and the radio are automatically turned on. While he shows me
his Singapore through the car window, we drive through the streets to the
sound of pop music.

Figure 1: On the road with a view of the central business district (Photo: © Lars Meier)

Being an observer from a separate viewpoint and being a brave explorer

Detachment from the outside world of the city is a constant experience for the expatriates.
Working in an isolated business park or in an office building with controlled access, driving

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in a car, living in a separated condominium, or spending leisure time in clubs: all these
places have formal entrance controls. The smell of the city, its sounds, and its climate are
outside the window. From the inside it is possible to discover the outside. The inside is associ-
ated with relaxation and socialising with peers.
Being an observer from a distant standpoint is bounded by its converse, being a brave discov-
erer of the foreign world. Part of constructing whiteness entails having no fear of entering a
foreign world, and considering the foreign as a noble challenge that confers prestige. The
whites differentiate themselves from the locals by describing them as anxious. The locals do
not play the role of observer, the whites describe them as being tied up in their families and
disconnected from the outer world. For the whites, exploring the foreign is described as a
strenuous activity that must be planned in advance. But it promises fine rewards of honour.
This is shown in the following interview sequence, in which one of my interviewees describes
the difference between the white expatriates and the Singaporeans in the case of Little India, a
Singapore city-quarter with a large proportion of Indian workers.
S5: “The expats have little fear of contact with Little India. The Singaporeans don’t go to Lit-
tle India. It is different for the expats…”
LM: “They go there?”
S5: “Yes, of course they go there, but the Singaporeans see it as very dangerous.”

For another interviewee the Singaporeans have a lack of interest in contacting different cul-
tures. He contrasted this with his self-description of being interested in foreign cultures, e.g. in
eating experiences at local food vendors in the so-called hawker stalls.
LM: “How would you describe your contact with the Singaporeans?”
S10: (Laughing) “It is practically non-existent. […] It is complicated. For example, when we
are having an annual dinner, there is a raffle after the lunch or some nonsense like that, and
after that they are gone. Then there is one table where the expatriates sit.”
LM: “Why?”
S10: “It is a typical Chinese thing: they sit the whole evening and eat. The food is already
three days old, but they continue eating it and drinking tea. And if they don’t, they want to be
amongst themselves, they don’t feel comfortable. I feel comfortable when I am going to a
restaurant or sometimes to a hawker stall.”

Returning now to our car drive around Singapore, we arrive after 15 minutes of
driving down a road near Holland Village. The interviewee shows me his former
home, where he lived with his children and his former wife some years ago.
Durability of colonial city structures constructs whiteness
Holland Village is a green residential district and a traditional expatriate area. Since it was
established in the late 1930s as a British military village, it has been defined as a classical city
quarter for Europeans. At that time special shops were installed to serve the needs of the Brit-
ish military personnel (cf. Chuang 1995). The contemporary expatriates’ decision to live in
Holland Village underlines the durability of colonial structures and their importance for con-
temporary everyday life in Singapore.
This durability is grounded on inscribed images of Holland Village as an expatriate quarter in
the context of the concentration of special places that are seen as specifically expatriate, such
as restaurants, boutiques, and particular shops. These images are spread by expatriate social
networks. The social networks of colleagues and employers are quite important for gathering
initial information about Singapore shortly after or even before arrival in the city. Expatriates’
use of these places in their everyday life is inscribed as the norm. The use of other places that
do not have the inscription of being expatriate is described as something special, which is
sometimes possible, but is necessarily bound to an active decision to avoid the usual expatriate
places.

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Figure 2: Villa in a preferred expatriate residential district (Photo: © Lars Meier)

He shows me the sign of his former street and says that he is responsible for
it. He sent a letter of complaint to the minister because nobody could find the
small street since it had the same name as the main road. After that the minis-
ter changed the street sign.

Making geography and bringing order to a previously disordered area

Like the structuring of the city into ethnic clusters by the British colonizer Sir Stamford
Raffles (cf. Perry/Kong/Yeoh 1997: 25–30), creating order is still part of whiteness.
We continue the ride to the German supermarket and he tells me that he will visit his girl-
friend in another Asian country and has to bring some German groceries, like “Prinzenrolle”
and “Schwarzbrot.” In the small market there are five other white customers and a Chinese
saleswoman. After carrying the shopping items to the car, we drive to the Swiss butcher, “a
gold mine,” says the banker. After entering the butchers, he greets the butcher in German
and speaks to a Chinese customer in Mandarin. He tells me that this woman calls herself a
banana because she has lived in the USA for a couple of years: yellow on the outside and
inside she is white. He claims that he is an egg, the outside is white and the inside is yellow.

The mark of whiteness is seen as durable. Whites have a consciousness of their whiteness
and construct this as solid and unchangeable
The following interview sequence with a white woman, talking to me about a weekend trip
with friends, underlines this claim.
S5: “A short time ago, when I was trekking on Lombok, there was also an expat there,
whom I didn’t know, but the others were all South-Koreans. In this context I was not con-
scious of being an expatriate or that I am a Westerner, that I am not an Asian. I have been
living here too long for that and I have too much contact with locals. In that moment I was
not thinking that I was different in some way.”
LM: “Okay.”
S5: “Maybe later on, just on the photographs or so […]. You always play a different role, I
think, you can’t escape it.”

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Figure 3: The German supermarket (Photo: © Lars Meier)

Continuing the drive through Singapore, he tells me that the wives of the male
expatriates will not leave Singapore, because for them it is such an easy and
pleasant life here. Singapore is a golden cage for expatriate women and they
become little princesses, according to my interviewee.

There is a special gendered division of labour for the white expatriate couples, which is
different from their German home
The white women mostly do not do household work in Singapore. They more often take the
role of an employer instructing the maid. Most of the expatriate families have a maid (a
woman from Southeast Asia), who organizes the household and looks after the children. The
expatriate women organize the cultural affairs and social contacts of the expatriate family in
Singapore and with friends and family in Germany. The women are also committed to wel-
fare organizations and to the German school in Singapore.

Continuing on in the car, we pass an Asian woman wearing short trousers. He

points at her through the car window and says: “Look, that’s the style here
and nobody thinks anything of it, they are so naïve here. In Europe everybody
would think: ‘Oh, hot pants!’ But here they don’t think about it and simply
wear it, because it is comfortable.” He said that many expatriates think that
they can take them and go to bed with them, but that is not always the case.

The whites contrast the other, the Asian women, as naïve and incapable of judging the effect
of their body presentation

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He stops at a gate, which is controlled by a Malay guard. The guard opens the
gate by remote control. The living area of my interviewee is surrounded by a
wall and a metal gate. He lives in a so-called condominium near the central
shopping street in Singapore. A condominium is an area with several high rise
flats, often with other white expatriate people living there. It usually has a
swimming pool, a gym, a barbeque area, sometimes tennis courts, and a small
supermarket, which are used communally by the residents of the condomin-
ium.

Separation is ubiquitous: The whites live, work, and spend their leisure time in separated
and guarded areas (bank buildings, condominiums, and clubs)
Living in clearly separated places is part of the everyday experience of the white expats. The
following interview sequence confirms that whiteness is often an entrance ticket to these
separated areas.
S2: “It is guarded by official security, there are guards walking around and there is a fence
in front. But if you want to enter the area—if you have white skin and if you are a Euro-
pean—the guard will let you in. Then you can drive in, that is not a problem.”

Figure 4: Gate of a condominium (Photo: © Lars Meier)

After parking his car in the condominium, we take the escalator to the 6th
floor and enter his apartment. In his apartment there are many articles of an-
tique Asian and German furniture and sculptures, which he brought from his
previous stays abroad. Hanging on the apartment wall is a picture of his
grandfather and a family tree.

The antiques recall the history of the whites. The whites have their own history, which is
cultivated by gathering antiques and history-related artefacts such as books on German
history.

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After entering the main living room he calls for the maid: “Hello, hello!” The
maid lives behind the kitchen in a so-called maid quarter, which contains a
small sleeping room, a corridor, and a bathroom. While showing me this he
mentions the air-conditioning in the maid quarter and tells me that he installed
it just for his maid and that this is an unusual service for maids here in Singa-
pore. By this he indicates that the Chinese normally treat their maids less well
than the Europeans do.

Being a benefactor is part of whiteness

The other, the Chinese upper class, is ascribed as being less cultivated and consequently not
treating their maids with the respect that the Whites do.

He tells me that his maid is from the Philippines and explains that the maids
from the Philippines are the most expensive, because they can speak English
and they are relatively the most easy-going. He has his maid from an agency,
they have pictures and biometrical data of the potential maids, and you choose
between them. He says that it is a sort of meat market.
While showing me the apartment, he complains about the absence of the
maid. He writes her a note and tells me that it’s good when she knows that he
has been here and she has not. He says that his maid is certainly at her boy-
friend’s and is sleeping there. To underline this he says that there is a box of
contraceptive pills on the table in the maid’s quarter.

The white man has to control the wild and naïve maid. His control impinges on her time and
intimate life.
Living in the same apartment with a maid is not a problem of privacy for the white man.
The small-scale separation is regulated by the reserved behaviour of the maid, up to being
invisible, and by strict time regulation of the maid’s presence in the main apartment.

We take the escalator down to the entrance of the condominium and leave by
car. My interviewee drives back to his office and I take the bus back home.
The ride is over.

C o n tr a s ti n g b e c om i n g W hi te i n L o n d o n
wi t h b ec om i n g W h it e i n S i n ga p or e

To summarize my findings: Being white and producing whiteness in everyday

practice is part of everyday segregation, which is, as I show for the Colonial
City Singapore, produced in the direct interaction with the other, the non-
White. Whiteness in Singapore is produced by inscribing it with creativity,
being experienced, being brave as an observer, having a cultural history,

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bringing order, and being a benefactor. Of course the other is described as

having the opposite attributes.
Understanding the construction of whiteness as a permanent everyday
process, I argue that there is a different significance to whiteness in London and
in Singapore, mediated by different everyday activities and constructions of
whiteness by the German professionals.
German expatriates come to Singapore and London with specific images
of the city and the other in their baggage. These images are translated and re-
produced in their everyday life. Place also matters for the mobile profession-
als, it matters in their actions and in their imaginations of the self and the
other.
Following a white professional in the developed, modern urban centre of
Singapore, I could demonstrate the durability of colonial images and their sig-
nificance for contemporary everyday life. Everyday life in the international
finance centre is strongly dependent on the historical routes which can now be
experienced in specific structures and also in specific images of the city.
These images are brought to the city, they are learned elsewhere in Germany,
and they become lived reality in Singapore. Therefore, from this point of
view, Singapore is still the colonial city.
In the case of Singapore, the ethnographic study could show that the other
is often not clearly separated in apparently homogenous city quarters. In fact,
segregation is produced also on a smaller scale inside the quarters: in the villa
or apartment, in interactions with the other in the form of a maid, living door
to door. In interactions in the workplace through contact with the other, as a
consequence of the ethnic division of labour, with the Asian secretary, the
Malay cleaner, and the highly qualified White. Or at places of leisure in con-
tacts between the Indian or Bangladeshi waiter and the white customer.
In the Imperial City London, segregation on the small scale level is not as
important as in Singapore; the white bank employees usually do not have
maids living in their home. Whiteness in London is not synonymous with be-
ing rich and being part of the elite. The other in London is also the white
worker or the white pauper. Segregation in London in the everyday life of the
bank employees is more important on the scale of city quarters.
For that reason it is not surprising that in London it is far more important
for the elite to differ by wearing fine clothes and carrying their entrance tick-
ets to elite places directly on the body: the bank employees in London all
wear formal black suits and ties. Achieving entrance to a golf club requires a
specific dress code. In contrast to those in London, the white finance employ-
ees in Singapore wear less formal clothes, sometimes polo-shirts or short-
sleeve shirts, and often no suits or ties. In Singapore being white, a synonym
for being elite, is enough to obtain entrance to special places.

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With my study I have pointed out that the global elite are not locating
their everyday life in a uniform global space. Everyday life is strongly
bounded by the specific city. Its history as a Colonial or an Imperial city can
be found in images transmitted to the present day, with enduring conse-
quences for contemporary constructions of identity and for everyday action,
as demonstrated in the case of the experience of whiteness in Singapore.

Re f e r e n c e s

Beaverstock, Jonathan V. (2002) “Transnational elites in global cities – Brit-

ish expatriates in Singapore’s financial district”. Geoforum, 33, pp. 528–
538.
Bonnett, Alastair (2000) White identities: Historical and International Per-
spectives, Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1987) Die feinen Unterschiede – Kritik der gesellschaftli-
chen Urteilskraft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Castells, Manuel (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford (UK)/
Malden (USA): Blackwell Publishers.
Chuang, Chang Tou (1995) “The ‘Expatriatisation’ of Holland Village” In
Brenda S.A. Yeoh/Lily Kong (eds.) Portraits of Places – History, Commu-
nity and Identity in Singapore, Singapore: TIMES Editions, pp.140–157.
Clifford, James (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century, Cambridge (MA)/London: Harvard University Press.
Duncan, John/Duncan, Nancy (1988) “(Re)reading the landscape”. Environ-
ment and Planning D: Society and Space 6, pp. 117–126.
Dyer, Richard (1997) White, London/New York: Routledge.
Fanon, Franz (1967) Black Skins, White Masks, London: Pluto.
Frankenberg, Ruth (1993) White Women Race Matters – The Social Construc-
tion of Whiteness, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Hall, Stuart (1994) “Der Westen und der Rest. Diskurs und Macht”. In: Stuart
Hall (ed.) Ausgewählte Schriften, 2, Hamburg: Argument Verlag, pp. 137–
179.
King, Anthony D. (1990) Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy –
Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System, London/
New York: Routledge.
Lambert, David (2005) “Producing/contesting whiteness: rebellion, anti-
slavery and enslavement in Barbados 1816”. Geoforum 36, pp. 29–43.
Perry, Martin/Kong, Lily/Yeoh, Brenda (1997) Singapore – A Developmental
City State, Chichester (UK) et al.: John Wiley & Sons.
Roediger, David (1992) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class, London: Verso.

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Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Har-

mondsworth: Penguin.
Sklair, Leslie (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford (UK)/
Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishers.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In Cary
Nelson/Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Cul-
ture, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, pp. 271–313.
Thandeka (1999) Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America,
New York: Continuum.

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Pow er Re lation s bet we en Sp ac e and G ende r

MARTINA LÖW/RENATE RUHNE

The paper takes a sociological look at the social construction of red-light dis-
tricts and sex work in Vienna (Austria) and Frankfurt (Germany). By analyz-
ing the organization of perceptions, glances, and corresponding body tech-
nologies on the one hand and common strategies of spatio-social control on
the other hand, we reconstruct the production of the field as materially and
symbolically separated from “normal” everyday life. As a devaluated “space
of the other,” it is intertwined with the (re)production of gender orders.

By turns glittering and erotic, tragic and destructive, sexwork is rooted in

large-scale industry and small-scale trade. As in many other women’s profes-
sions, including e.g. speech therapy, homeopathy, beauty culture, training is
not government-regulated and women themselves usually have to foot the
bill. Another aspect that links prostitutes with hairdressers, nurses, and sales-
girls is body-related activity and emotional work. Sexwork is surrounded by a
world of images—and largely unexplored. There is no classic technical narra-
tive on prostitution that could serve as orientation for practitioners or a subject
of study for scholars. What we find instead are endless mythological depic-
tions ranging from the supposed glamour of the red-light milieu to the plight
of wretchedly exploited women; on the one hand these depictions provide no
orientational knowledge of the field, and on the other hand they present
highly disparate technical findings that resist any attempts to weave them into
a coherent body of expert knowledge. While sexworkers, pimps, social work-
ers, and police officers are very knowledgeable in the field of prostitution, this
knowledge is contradictory and broken up into different strands of the narra-

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tive. With the same self-assurance, some sexworkers speak of sexuality ful-
filled in the course of work (e.g. Domentat 2003), while others, on talk shows,
note that things are getting bad “when you start to feel anything.” While po-
lice officers in one department underline the important role played in prostitu-
tion by the traffic in human beings, a different department, or a street worker,
may report on biographies marked by voluntary migration. Sometimes prosti-
tution is described as a filthy, degrading, dangerous trade, sometimes it is de-
picted as self-determined work pursued to gain a living.
There appears to be no agreement in society—in the sense of scholarly
findings—on the world of prostitution. If there is in most social fields a domi-
nant narrative that serves, among other things, to guide the perceptions of the
persons involved, what we can observe in the red-light milieu breaks down
into numberless truths that exist, unmediated, side by side.
In the midst of this complex of contradictory and yet well-documented
expert opinions and evidence, we will, in what follows, attempt a change of
perspective, not focusing on sociopolitical, criminological, or legal issues of
the kind typical of today’s research narratives on sexwork but analyzing, eth-
nographically, the spaces and places of prostitution. These will serve as the
empirical base for a reconstruction of the gender-specific arrangements typi-
cal of sexwork. The present paper centers on the findings of three months of
research conducted at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies
(IFK) in Vienna. The paper is furthermore based on a research project (DFG)
on “The Effective Structure of Space and Gender: the Example of Prostitution
in Frankfurt on the Main.” Apart from evaluations of observations and docu-
ments, both projects are based on expert interviews with prostitutes, social
workers and police officers, affected neighbors, and legal practitioners. We
will concentrate on space-related strategies that use regimes of gazing and
social control to create identity and to produce spaces of the Other.

The organization of gazing in Vienna

Flying into Vienna, posters announce to the new arrival what the town has in
store for her. The first picture: Welcome in Schönbrunn. Vienna is known for
its emperors and kings, famed for its empresses Sisi and Maria Theresia. It
was the latter who had prostitution banned throughout Austria. The poster
likewise makes reference to the zoo as an idyllic setting for children and as a
trove of nature imagines. The second poster is devoted to art. Vienna success-
fully markets itself as a stronghold of the arts. Now it must be music’s turn,
we think. “Wine, woman, and song,” as the guidebook puts it. But “woman”
comes only after Schönbrunn and Giorgione.

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When you leave the arrivals section, you can’t miss the “Babylon’s” at-
tempts to woo customers, old and new. Babylon, symbolic of mankind’s at-
tempt to approach God, and its failure, stands for the birth of diversity no less
than for the lack of ability to understand it. Women on the poster welcome us,
all of them white-skinned, and all of them clad in innocently white undergar-
ments. Angels, creatures without gender and sexuality! And yet—the lascivi-
ous posture of the ladies seated on red satin seem suggestive of something.
But of what? We think of a musical theater, of a movie poster. Who would
have thought that Vienna’s noble brothel would advertise here at the airport?
Only those in the know. The poster must be meant as a welcome to the regular
customer. And be geared to inducing a certain recognition effect in the new-
comer: Even at the airport there can be no doubt: in Vienna prostitution is
everywhere, but it’s decent, not at all conspicuous. The game of hide-and-
seek is taken to perfection in Vienna.
In Vienna there is no world-famous red-light district like that in St. Pauli
in Hamburg, and Vienna does not welcome its visitors with a sea of whore-
houses like Frankfurt on the Main. True, in Vienna, too, there are the bars along
the Gürtel, the “Belt,” Vienna’s main drag, close to the Westbahnhof and the
streetwalker district just behind it, but these two sex-miles are more or less
inconspicuous, at least compared with the massive presence of an official red-
light district. In Vienna the visitor will not find a red-light district.

On the ground: exploring the Belt

We start out with the brothels along the Belt. Today, the spatial arrangement
is heterogeneous. The buildings around the subway station house are scene
bars, small booths where kebab is sold; and the alleyways are punctuated, at
more or less regular intervals, by bars illuminated in red. Both the façades and
the advertising are designed to give off stereotyped signals. The lips, the
champagne glass, the high-heeled shoe. Again and again! There is music in
the air. And there are women standing in front of some of the bars. All with
white skin, black getup, and red lips. Somehow they have all managed to be
blond on this evening. Sometimes you see women sitting in shop windows.
They don’t move. Their legs are stretched upward, their heads tossed back.
They seem relaxed, and very attractive. It’s still early in the evening. There
are hardly any male customers to be seen. Coming in from the dusky light
outside, we are overwhelmed by the darkness inside. We can hardly make out
the arrangements. Visibility is reduced to a minimum. But there is an odor of
sweetish perfume in the air. We were told by the feminist counseling centers
that you have to ask the owner or the barmaid whether you can speak to the
women there. One of us walks up to a woman. For her, deciding which one to

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speak to is just as intuitive as the conduct of customers is always reported to

be. Customers approach these women, and they in turn signal their readiness
to respond openly. The women are not simply passively chosen. They use
glances, poises to express sympathy or rejection. Many customers are—like
us in this situation—very insecure. We are glad for the signals given by the
women. Street workers tell stories about the concerns of a good number of
sexworkers who are not often approached by men. For the most part—social
workers report—women who despise their own activity have more trouble
acquiring customers than women who think highly of, or are at least tolerant
of, sexuality, their trade, or their own body. So we approach the women
whose gaze we interpret as curiosity and frankness.
What we are in here is an arrangement deliberately staged as “another, a
different world.” It’s oppressively hot. Otherwise the women would be cold,
lightly dressed as they are. The dominant colors are red and black. We speak
with the sexworker about a concern allegedly often addressed by women,
namely about men. She tells us that men—at least those who are not regu-
lars—always first sit down at the bar—and seek to survey the room. They
often prefer to remain on their safe seat at the bar and have the women shown
to them there—without having to walk through the room, exposing them-
selves to the gaze of the others. They prefer to gaze themselves. The barmaid
helps out. “Come on, show yourselves!” is a call frequently to be heard. This
allows the man to gaze and chose.

Ch a n g e o f f o c u s

Men don’t want to be seen. Christine Howe, who worked for many years with
the now-defunct prostitute project Agisra e.V., reports: “We also do street
work, and when you see how men start out by looking around before entering
a brothel, you get the impression that their space-related threshold fear is also
an endopsychic fear. When, on the other hand, you observe them leaving the
brothel, sometimes even falling out the door and having to seek orientation,
sometimes even walking off in the wrong direction, then it almost seems as
though they had just stepped over the threshold between two completely dif-
ferent worlds” (Howe, quoted after Domentat 2003: 93f.). As one social
worker reports, taking a photo in the red-light district is like switching on the
light. We have often heard—slightly amused—insiders report that men tend
to look around before entering such a bar to make sure nobody is watching
them. A brothel operator reports that many men hardly even have the courage
to look these women straight in the eye.
As with any social encounter, the culture of the gaze is the essential ele-
ment here that defines the opening of the encounter. The basic rule is that it is

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the women—not the men—who have to show themselves. That is, they stage
a showing that veils their own gaze, giving the men a greater sense of secu-
rity. One essential component of this enactment is to seem to cede the voyeur-
istic gaze to the man.
Studies on film theory and picture interpretation (for a summary, cf. Mathes
2001: 105; Hentschel 2001) suggest that practicing a scientifically detached
viewing e.g. of paintings is an approach used to produce and reproduce the
cultural construction of heterosexuality. The picture based on perspective cre-
ates the impression of depth and thus of spatiality before the eyes of the be-
holder, a spatiality which is further reinforced by the moving pictures served
up in the cinema. “The commercial film aims, by employing inconspicuous
cutting and camera techniques, to create the impression of a continuous, ho-
mogenous picture space and to place the observer in a panoramic position”
(Hentschel 2001: 153). The fact that spaces have traditionally been imagined
as women (resp. women’s bodies) (cf. Löw 2001: 115ff. for more informa-
tion) gives rise to a cultural association between spaces viewed and female
bodies. As literary criticism has frequently noted, this overlapping of spatial
fantasies and female bodies (cf. Weigel 1990; Kubitz-Kramer 1995) ties the
perspective-minded voyeuristic gaze, which dissects without being seen, into
a genderized and genderizing context. In the absolutist notion of space, the
open picture space is experienced as something like the promise of a tendered
and open female body, and at the same time described as the womb with its
promise of security (Colomina 1997) and of lust (Weigel 1990; Hentschel
2001). Against the background of a dual-gender, heterosexual matrix, two
potentially contrary positions become manifest: that of the male gaze and that
of the female as the object gazed upon.
Some brothel/bar operators manage to make optimal use of the potentials
of the world of the picture and the film. The social constellation inside a bar,
devised as it is to having women show themselves, places the man in a pano-
ramic position. The women before his eyes move as if they were in a film—
and these are women who are willing to keep the promise of the open female
body, and who, using, say, makeup and wigs, shape their body in conformity
with stereotyped images of femininity. The picture space is also reenacted
through the arrangement of the show windows. Women place themselves in
the window frame in such a way as to blur the difference between endless
pictures of iniquitous women and a concrete bodily presence. The women
become the picture. One thing that is typical here is that establishments that
do not advertise by placing women in their windows often replace them with
a picture. In astonishing monotony, the typical Viennese façade will feature a
champagne glass and a high-heeled shoe as symbols of prostitution. While the
high-heeled shoe may be read as a fetish, the champagne glass suggests, to the
pornographic gaze, the male organism. The popping cork, the spurting cham-

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pagne are commonly staged as a symbol for male ejaculation and orgasm. The
glass, with its triangular form resting on the stem, is designed to receive the
champagne, with its associations of ejaculate. This sets the stage for the inof-
fensive champagne glass on the façade to tell its tale of promise and well-
being.

The organization of social control in Frankfurt

For tourists coming to Frankfurt on the Main (especially lonely business trav-
elers looking for a little relaxation), the “Essential City Guide,” available in
hotels, recommends a visit to various prostitution areas. Under the headline
“Adult Entertainment” there are two pages describing brothels, Eros centers,
strip clubs, and sex shops (Essential City Guide Frankfurt, Jan./Feb. 2005:
28–29). Nearly all of them can be found in a very small area of the town, lo-
cated near the main railway station, named the “Frankfurter Bahnhofsviertel.”
The area is described as “one of the largest red light districts in the world”
and visitors to Frankfurt are informed that they need not worry, since as pros-
titution is “completely legal” and quite common in Germany.
But at the same time, prostitution is a controversial topic in Germany. As
well as being seen as “abnormal” and “immoral,” it also still carries the stigma
of a sexual taboo (cf. e.g. Laskowski 1997: 80). Although the reality of prosti-
tution is an open secret, it is deliberately kept under cover in the grey area on
the social fringe of urban life. Despite being legal—in principle—the need for
specific controls is expressed again and again. This is especially so in Frank-
furt: according to encyclopedias on the subject, there is hardly another Ger-
man city as restrictive in its attitude toward prostitution (Feige 2003: 240).
And this is confirmed in interviews with brothel owners, for example, who
have the impression of being “overwhelmed by a stream of never-ending rules
and regulations.”
The main political steering mechanism is the so called “Sperrgebiets-
verordnung” (which roughly translates as: Restricted Area Decree or Law).
There are such regulations in many German cities; they serve to restrict and
concentrate prostitution to certain areas, and especially to keep it away from
family neighborhoods and places of worship. In this way “Sperrgebiets-
verordnungen,” or “restricted area decrees,” are officially intended to protect
young people and maintain public decency.
But restricted area decrees, which have been introduced by local authori-
ties as a reaction to a phenomenon that is seen as problematic, also play an
active part in producing it. The way they do this is by producing spatial pat-

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terns of social structure, which—in particular—stabilize gender relations1.

This will be explained in what follows.
“Restricted area decrees” define those parts of the cities where either spe-
cial or all forms of prostitution are allowed or forbidden. Absolutely restricted
areas in Frankfurt—where prostitution is completely banned—are the districts
of “Sachsenhausen” and the “Bahnhofsviertel.” However, in this “Bahnhofs-
viertel” there is a small area with numerous buildings, separate though close
to each other, which are permitted to operate as brothels. The Bahnhofsviertel
therefore is in a paradoxical situation—produced by the “Sperrgebietsverord-
nung” itself. On the one hand it is an absolutely restricted area where no pros-
titution is allowed at all. On the other it is a clearly visible and well established
red-light district. Apart from some rather unattractive—and for this reason
hardly used—areas, brothel prostitution is also tolerated in two very small
districts. In nearly all other parts of the city it is forbidden to practice prostitu-
tion on public streets, paths, in squares and public parks, in prostitute accom-
modations, or in similar facilities. However, one thing that is tolerated is dis-
creet apartment or flat prostitution.
In the following, the specific effects of the “Sperrgebietsverordnung” in
the urban structure will be illustrated by two examples: First, there is brothel
prostitution in the few tolerance zones, and especially in the “Bahnhofs-
viertel.” With 1200–1500 women working in this sector, this is—even if only
by number—by far the most important type of prostitution in Frankfurt. Sec-
ond, we have flat or apartment prostitution, which is the other main form of
prostitution in Frankfurt with about 500 to 700 working women, spread all
over the town.

Brothel prostitution in the “Bahnhofsviertel”—

a red-light district in the centre of the restricted
area for prostitution

Despite being—in principle—defined as a restricted area, the “Bahnhofs-

viertel” is the center of brothel prostitution in Frankfurt (Molloy 1992: 55)2
because it includes numerous brothel-oriented exceptions. The term “brothel”
is used here to indicate “Laufhäuser,” which may be roughly translated as “run-
ning-through-” or “drop-in-houses” where the “working girls rent small rooms
for the day or just for a few hours” (Essential City Guide). Potential male cli-

1 For the basic analytical model see Ruhne 2003.

2 You will find brothel or “running-through-house” prostitution in Frankfurt/M.
mainly in the Bahnhofsviertel with a capacity of 650 rooms/ beds in total. On
average a house has between 30 to 60 rooms, but the capacity can rise to 180
rooms per brothel.

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MARTINA LÖW/RENATE RUHNE

ents walk in without any restriction and can wander through the halls and cor-
ridors of the building, passing closed or open doors, where the female tenants
of the rooms present themselves and their services to the customers in the
apartment doorways.
As one prostitute explained in an interview, the reputation of a brothel is
mainly spread by word of mouth and “fuelled” by its popularity. In this sense
an effective public presentation of the business is very important for its profit-
ability. So, in addition to ads in city guides or on the Internet, the house fa-
çades are covered with attention-grabbing advertisements. Façades with red
hearts, symbolized women’s bodies, or huge painted notice boards with “Eros
Centre,” “Sexy Land,” “Erotic Shop,” or “Erotic Bar” attract the attention of
potential customers, while doormen and styled women in the entrance hall try
to entice them in. Buildings “work” with artful stagings, with show-window
dummies, day and night, conveying to the outside, in various poses, what must
be supposed to be happening inside.
In addition to the public visibility of every single “running-through-house,”
the brothels are concentrated within the tolerance zone in a relatively small
area mainly around the Mosel-, Taunus-, and Elbestrasse. These three streets
are where the big brothels are located and where most of the sex industry is to
be found in Frankfurt. Even during the day you can’t overlook this, despite
the fact that the area is broken up by shops, cafés, and fast-food outlets. Para-
phrases like “shining red heart district,” which were used again and again in
interviews, point to the “Bahnhofsviertel” as an area in the city where the sex
trade is concentrated and—as a result of this concentration—is highly visible.
And the eye-catching properties of prostitution in the Bahnhofsviertel are
intensified especially at night, when the “red hearts” really shine: Light chains,
flashing illuminations, pink neon signs in windows, and so on leave one in no
doubt about the kind and extent of business on offer there.

Apartment prostitution in Frankfurt—a discreet

form of prostitution

In Frankfurt the prostitute working in an individual flat or apartment is an-

other important but less high-profile form of the sex trade. Its discreet and
nearly private character is explicitly required by the local authority: “Apart-
ment prostitution” is only allowed when the flat is, in reality, equipped and
used for daily living. Occasionally, this may be controlled by the local author-
ity, and nothing is permitted that would enable outsiders (including the neigh-
bors) to be able to recognize that the accommodation is being used for the
purpose of prostitution. This means that any form of advertising on the out-
side of the apartment is strictly forbidden. The working women advertise their

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services in newspapers or on the Internet, for example. Potential clients phone

first, and an appointment may be arranged.
The discreet, private, and intimate character of this type of prostitution
distinguishes it from brothel prostitution. But this is not only a marketing
strategy that might be of interest to the client and the prostitute, it is also re-
lated to the rules of the local authorities and the way legal and illegal actions
are defined. Apartment prostitution is legal only if it mimics the bourgeois
environment and becomes invisible (as prostitution).
So, although apartment prostitution—in contrast to brothel prostitution—
is spread over the whole city, political regulation nevertheless aims at exclu-
sion. As Phil Hubbard notes, the “social marginalisation of prostitutes is re-
flected in their spatial isolation and exclusion” (Hubbard 1998b: 270); but, as
we have seen, the exclusion and marginalization may be quite different in
kind. While brothel prostitution is kept away from the other parts of the city
by concentrating it in specially defined areas, apartment prostitution “disap-
pears” by being adapted to a “respectable” lifestyle.

The (re)production of prostitution as a “space of

the other” through social control mechanisms

Social control mechanisms have specific effects on the social and geographic
distribution of the field. Political strategies have—in this sense—an important
influence on steering “placing-” or “spacing-processes” (Löw 2001), which we
mark as the main factors in the construction and constitution of space. But as
factors that construct and constitute space, they also create a specific “synthe-
sis” (Löw 2001), that is, special perceptions of the activity of prostitution. The
required adaptation to the respectable bourgeois lifestyle of the surrounding
neighborhood in apartment prostitution means—if it is done to the standards
set by the controlling authority—that it is no longer recognizable from the
outside. On the one hand this is because it happens behind closed doors, on
the other because of its nearly perfect adaptation to its supposedly respectable
surroundings. As a side effect of their successful control policy, even local
authorities have very little information on apartment prostitution.
In the case of the brothel prostitution in the “Bahnhofsviertel,” prostitu-
tion is kept away from other parts of the city by concentrating it in small well-
defined areas of tolerance. On the back of the “restricted area policy,” prosti-
tution here establishes itself as a high-profile and exposed “space of the
other,” which defines the public image of the whole field, especially because
of the invisibility and low profile of the much more “normal” apartment pros-
titution.

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MARTINA LÖW/RENATE RUHNE

But the perception of prostitution in the Bahnhofsviertel—which in this

way has a strong impact on the common perception of prostitution—is, in ad-
dition, highly influenced by processes of spatial synthesis combined with ef-
fects of social stigma. As an example, the close proximity between legal and
illegal forms of prostitution may be cited. Legal brothel prostitution in the
Bahnhofsviertel is situated very close to illegal street prostitution, where mainly
female drug addicts work. Drug-related street prostitution in the Bahnhofs-
viertel is tolerated by the city authorities. They argue that with their limited
resources they would not be able to prevent this from happening anyway. But
for this reason both forms of prostitution share the same space in the city: On
the streets it is hardly possible to distinguish systematically between legal and
illegal (drug-related) prostitution. Therefore the publicly known and clearly
visible—but illegal—street prostitution in the Bahnhofsviertel underlines the
basic image of the area not only as a “red-light district,” but also as a “prob-
lematic red-light district.” Furthermore, the clearly visible measures taken to
prevent dangers in the Bahnhofsviertel—for example a strong street presence
of police and regulating bodies—does not always improve the sense of secu-
rity. Instead it marks out and symbolizes a feeling of insecurity, regardless of
the real level of danger. In this way it confirms the construction of a socially
problematic space of the other. Prostitution is included in this because it is
located in this area of the city.

Co n c l u s i o n s

Comparing Vienna with Frankfurt on the Main, we find in Frankfurt that

many stagings are more clearly addressed to specific milieus. Here, distinc-
tion is the principle behind the designs. Here we find façade designs that in-
clude flowerboxes and fir sprigs that remind the observer of Christmas family
idylls, and yet red lamps, supported by red ribbons in the fir sprigs, clearly
indicate what the building contains. A clearly observable threshold enactment
points unmistakably to the building’s acquired public character as a brothel.
Vienna lacks a “place of the Other” that is at once visible for all and familiar
to every child. Vienna has many scattered places of the Other that together
form a space of their own that refer to and complement one another. In Vi-
enna people still tell the story of Kaiser Joseph II, who, asked to lift the ban
on brothels, is said to have responded: “What, brothels? All I’d have to do is
build a big roof over the whole of Vienna…” (Anwander/Neudecker 1999:
67).
So it is that the structure of the trade reproduces itself at the city level.
The game of hide-and-seek, a favorite of modern society, is perfected in sex-
work. Both social workers and customers report again and again on the “other

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world” that they encounter in relevant bars. Many of them have trouble de-
scribing this other world. In interviews they refer to it as “mysterious” or note
that “it’s the clandestine that shapes the atmosphere.” If they are to survive,
secrets may not be allowed to become public. In the field of prostitution male
customers and sexworkers/“clandestine prostitutes” work hand in hand in pre-
serving the secretive, mysterious. Women who are not part of paid sexwork
are simply members of the bothersome public. Prostitution reverses the mid-
dle-class logic that assigns women to the private sphere: It opens up a subcul-
tural field of public female “bodies” (the prostitutes) and a public “sphere,”
which is represented by “middle-class” women.
But what is it that is enacted here as a secret meant to be kept? Male sexu-
ality? Sexuality in general? Male insecurity? Few studies have been written
on male customers. And these are mostly based on reports of prostitutes, not
on what customers themselves have to say (Girtler 1990: 143ff.; Bilitewski et
al. 1994/1991). There is little founded information available on the films—
including films of different types—in which men set out to play the leading role
by setting foot in a brothel. It is a striking fact that (surprisingly) many elements
of the love film crop up in the world of anonymous sex. “Ring the bell and
step into bliss,” announces one sign on the door of a Vienna brothel. Others
place little hearts and arrows in clearly visible spots of the entryway, or use
neon signs blinking out the call “Love me.”
In a forthcoming interview study, Sabine Grenz (2004) shows how impor-
tant it is for many men not to be nagged by the sense that “it” is all done for
the money. And if it still feels that way, these men tend to believe that they
have simply not paid enough. Despite this explicitly “the more expensive, the
more genuine” logic, many men are convinced that their favorite whore is
really happy to see them in person; that a domina is a woman who really likes
to deal out blows; or that “certain reactions” show them that there are “things”
that “you just can’t put on” (original quote from Grenz 2004: 7). The ideal of
the private relationship, Grenz notes, assumes an unadulterated form in prosti-
tution: an exchange based on give and take. “In Germany over one million
men avail themselves daily of the services [provided by prostitutes]” (Deut-
scher Bundestag 2001: 4; cf. also Laskowski 1997: 80). The Berlin Hydra pros-
titute project even estimates that every day up to 1.5 million men make use of
the services of prostitutes (see Mitrovic 2002: 70). In Vienna alone, every
night some 15,000 men are reported to look up sexworkers.
In this connection, the definitions of prostitution typically offered by the
social sciences may be “summed up as ‘sex for money’ with various modifi-
cations” (Laskowski 1997: 46). Accordingly, prostitutes are referred to as per-
sons or “individuals who receive payment (whether financial or otherwise) for
sexual services” (Hubbard 1998b: 269). Only a sound consumer research
would be able to determine whether or not this definition does not more than

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oversimplify the field of prostitution. It is likely that in the end no secrets will
be revealed; instead, the enactment of the secret opens up the possibility to
step across a threshold. Nothing happens on the other side that is not con-
cealed by the one side as well, but the enactment of an “other side” opens up
fantasy spaces, shifts in the staging and practices of desire. Furthermore, it is
precisely the enactment of the male and the female as its object—a far more
fragile experience in everyday life—that is used to learn and practice a basic
social structure that serves to stabilize power relations, as it were, despite the
fragility of everyday experience. The examples of Vienna and Frankfurt have
shown us that prostitution is a very exclusive and excluded social field. The
background of the exclusion of prostitution is that this is a field seen as ab-
normal, immoral, and potentially dangerous. The “restricted area decree” of
Frankfurt, for example, illustrates this by aiming to protect young people and
“public morals.”
Practices of separating off prostitution—as we know them today—assumed
more and more importance in European cities in the 18th and especially the
19th centuries and they aimed—as spatially oriented control strategies—from
the very beginning to exclude immoral, stigmatized prostitution from the mo-
rality of developing bourgeois everyday life. The exclusion of prostitution
was strongly connected with the general separation and exclusion of sexuality
as bodily experiences in everyday life, which was established at the same
time. However, this separation manifested marked sex-specific differences: in
the context of bourgeois gender structures, the dichotomous concepts of
“male” and “female” limited the sexuality of “respectable” women to the mo-
nogamous intimacy of marriage, while the bourgeois men experienced two
opposite types of love and sexuality: On the one hand there was the spiritual
love of the bourgeois woman, who had to be more or less passive and without
any desire (Schulte 1984: 154), and on the other hand there was the conven-
tion of prostitutional sexuality as a “valve” (Schulte 1984: 151).
Both forms are divided into different areas of social life. By using meas-
ures of social control—in much the same way as perceptions, glances, and
corresponding body technologies, for example—prostitution is, as we have
seen, constructed as a “space of the other,” where deviant and “abnormal”
forms of heterosexual relationships—like actively courting women or “inse-
cure” men—are excluded and hidden. In this way the social construction of
prostitution is included in social structures like gender relations. The “space
of the other” protects and stabilizes the recognition of a strictly divided con-
cept of opposite sexes, with the “moral” and “respectable” bourgeois lifestyle
defined as “normal.” Perception and placing practices, material and symbolic
arrangements, forms of social control, and boundaries etc. have been used to
ensure the reproduction of social patterns of order and to stabilize (gender-)
specific constructions of identity.

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 PROSTITUTION—POWER RELATIONS BETWEEN SPACE AND GENDER

But the processes of exclusion are by no means restricted only to the gen-
der regime, they produce “the other” in different variants. In sharp contrast to
an increasingly self-determined picture of women, even in prostitution we
today find images and reports of ill-treated, battered, raped, bound, alien fe-
male bodies that—far from being merely “victims of circumstances”—often
also assume the character of a symbol of threats to the nation. Under the in-
fluence of unfocused globalization anxieties, traditional power relations of the
“national project” nowadays appear to be up for renegotiation. Threats from
diseases like Aids, for example, and feelings of guilt regarding the North’s
and the West’s exploitation of the South and the East being negotiated in
terms of a foreign and alien “migrant identity” that is at the same time mar-
ginalized. In this context the field of prostitution shows us that demarcations
of social order can change and that the “wardens of social order” change
along with those they are in charge of.

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Bilitewsky, Helga/Czajka, Maya/Fischer, Claudia/Klee, Stephanie/Repetto,
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tituiertenprojekt Hydra]. München.
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Hubbard, Phil (1998a) “Sexuality, Immorality and the City. Red-light districts
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III. IMAGERIES OF CITIES
Between Refeudalization and New Cultural Politics:
The 300th Anniversary of St. Petersburg

ELENA TRUBINA

In this paper, I look at the celebration of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg
in order to show that certain elements of public memory and cultural politics can
be seen as counterbalancing the tendencies of “state image promotion“.1

Introduction

The dissemination of a positive image of Russia has been implemented both

nationally and internationally. The celebration of capital cities that comprises
an important part of the Russian political culture has also been involved in the
ongoing state image promotion (cf. Boym 2001). With this in mind, I will first
trace the continuities between pre-Soviet and post-Soviet cultural practices in
the light of Habermasian work on public sphere. Second, I will outline what I
believe are the promising approaches and strategies of the new cultural practi-
tioners. Finally, I will touch briefly upon the methodological problems related
to a researcher’s wish to retain both the normative and the descriptive dimen-
sion of his or her work on a particular case. By applying the notion of “refeu-
dalization” to the discourses and signifying practices through which a number
of officials have constructed dominant representations of the city and its
inhabitants, I hope to emphasize the complexity of the constellation of
historical epochs, temporalities, mythologies, ways to sustain state power,
popular participations, and cultural imaginations that historical developments
of transition result in. If in their everyday life city inhabitants remain relatively

1 For an extended version of this paper, cf. Trubina 2005.

155
ELENA TRUBINA

immune to this complexity, it is the state-organized celebrations that make

them reflect on both historical continuity and disjuncture in the relationships
of political elites and the general public.2

The ambivalence of imperial heritage

In countries in transition we witness the growing role of cities in the devel-

opment of capitalism, their function as hubs allowing productive links among
the various markets and controlling investment in services, broadcasting,
transportation, commodity manufacturing, built form, advertising, department
stores, and so forth. The ambitions and spending habits of high earners seem
to have been the major driving force in the development of many cities. And
it is urban landscapes that give the economic, social, and political tendencies
particular configurations when the mindsets and the systems of values of the
ruling classes confront particular urban traditions.
The more actively the Russian state reduces and eliminates subsidies, de-
regulates prices, and ceases to provide services people had come to expect,
the more eagerly it tries to position itself as a basis of social solidarity, as an
entity with which people might identify. The capital cities may be counted
among the most powerful stately images. In part, their efficiency as vehicles
of political power has to do with the narratives they embody or represent. I
want to emphasize, however, that urban narratives have not always been suc-
cessfully appropriated by the state. Sometimes the multilayered story that a
city embodies comes into conflict with the state’s implementation of particu-
lar kinds of politics.
During the three hundred years of St. Petersburg’s history, the city has
been used for the dissemination of narratives of national identity. They range
from those about defeating nature by means of building this most beautiful
city on a swamp, over the story of the city as the cradle of the Bolshevik revo-
lution, to its conception as the genuine and the most European city in Russia.
Most narratives turn the long process of energetic modernization into roman-
tic myths, with little attention to human costs. The abundance of sites related
to the days of the Russian Empire, and the fact that its core was quickly built
according to a plan, give the city its formal, strict, elegant, and noble look,
and St. Petersburg persists in carrying on its historic role as the site of royalty
and aristocratic society. However, the city seems to resist attempts to interpret
it simply as a historic citadel of the highborn living in sanctioned aloofness

2 My empirical material consists of four taped semi-structured interviews and field

notes of some 10,500 words from numerous informal talks. There are about
twenty respondents in the sample that originates from field studies in St. Peters-
burg in June 2003.

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 BETWEEN REFEUDALIZATION AND NEW CULTURAL POLITICS

while the silent majority hardly scrapes by. The complex history of the city
resulted in the development of a characteristic (and heavily mythologized)
mentality of its inhabitants, a combination of self-reliance, bohemian suspi-
cion towards material values, undemonstrative manners, and a sense of be-
longing to a past that is not rigid and finalized but so vitally connected to the
present that it seems to question the present. Today the flats in the old build-
ings with characteristically “high ceilings” (six meters and higher) are likely
to be occupied by both well-off people and those whose families lived here
for generations. The striking contrast between what is outside (glorious fa-
cades) and what is inside (crumbling stairways, decaying plumbing) is not
only often shared by people with totally different levels of income, and has
not only come to signify one of the city’s peculiarities, but also has even be-
come a source of local pride. This contributes to a sense of democratic city
life that consists of people of nearly all backgrounds sharing a common pre-
dicament.
St. Petersburg has a long history of public celebrations, which played a
mediating role between its collective urban memory and the nationalist poli-
tics of history. Starting from the royal entry (already by 1712 St. Petersburg
was the official capital of the Russian Empire) to the Soviet celebrations of
May Day, to celebrations of cosmos exploits, of endless centennials and bi-
centennials of Russian writers, the festivals and celebrations encompass an
important way of memorializing significant events. Although Soviet public
celebrations were, as a rule, initiated by authorities, they have made their way
into people’s memories and managed to generate quite powerful public emo-
tions. They also had to do with the authorities’ desire to mobilize people emo-
tionally and to educate them. Similarly, the celebrations in cities that origi-
nated in pre-Revolutionary times were an efficient way to fuse local and re-
gional identities with national identity. As a result, the festivals have defi-
nitely become a part of national culture. What differentiates St. Petersburg’s
recent anniversary is that it signifies a development of the city festival from
being part of national and city culture to being a constructed event designed
not only to attract tourists but to turn the city into a presidential capital.
A few cities have celebrated their anniversaries during the past few years
(the 400th anniversary of Smolensk in 2002, the 400th anniversary of Tomsk
in 2003, etc.). But in striking contrast to St. Petersburg, the amount of their
funding by the federal government was negligible. The degree of importance
presently being attached to everything related to “Pieter”—this is what St. Pe-
tersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg is called by its inhabitants in lo-
cal parlance—can be quite easily explained. The Russian president, Vladimir
Putin, had been a member of the city administration for some time, and, as
president, he repeatedly expressed his concern for his home town. Thus the
300th anniversary of St. Petersburg (celebrated in 2003 at the end of May)

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came in handy both for the city’s authorities and for the so-called “pieterskie”—
those working in the Kremlin administration who came from this city (Putin
has a record of appointing his former colleagues to key government posi-
tions). There is a sense in which the way the celebration was designed and
executed betrays the real attitude of authorities towards perspectives of de-
mocracy in Russia.
While being exposed for months to all sorts of inconveniences related to
the major face-lift their city was given prior the celebration, the city inhabi-
tants were not shy to point out that this event was not actually “for them.” As
one of my interlocutors put it, “For some it is a good chance to make a fortune
while for the others it all is about politics.” He said that the city celebration
concerns all its inhabitants, but when asked how he thought it would be possi-
ble to make the celebration “for all,” he had difficulty answering. It seems
that the post-Soviet public’s image of itself remains vague and elusive. In-
deed, what establishes the public presence of “simple people” when it comes
to national celebrations? The collisions between ongoing politicization of ur-
ban and national memory and city publics take place along the evolution of
the Russian political regime from representative democracy through a “man-
aged” one to bureaucratic authoritarianism. With the celebration, an ambigu-
ous attempt was made to promote an image of Russia as a country that was
undergoing democratic reforms (in his speeches Putin repeatedly pledged al-
legiance to democracy) while emphasizing those components of the city heri-
tage that are related to the fact that St. Petersburg was a capital of imperial
Russia. It did reveal both the intriguing play of patterns of the past and the
hybridity of Russian political culture. What I mean is that for the Russian
Federation, as one of so-called new independent states, it was necessary to
construct a national identity, to strengthen national traditions and values, and
to amplify understanding of a historical continuity in people’s minds. On the
other hand, economic globalization and transnational political interaction
caused rapid change of people’s identities. Against this background, the tradi-
tional national rhetoric implying loyalty to the roots, patriotism, etc. is losing
its effectiveness and needs to be re-invented in order to be effective.
When a once-great power loses its political and economic dominance and
rapidly moves to the periphery of international politics, imperialistic nostalgia
enables the nation to retain a certain dignity. St. Petersburg is considered by
many to be the most European of all Russian cities, but this is not what cap-
tures the imagination of the Russian political elite. According to one observa-
tion, “Along with the rest of society, the elite consider the Russian Federation
as a successor not only of the Soviet Union but, even to a greater extent, of
the Russian Empire. Subconsciously, Russian elite […] aimed to come back
to pre-Communist past” (Trenin 2004: 10). Numerous palaces, buildings, and
museums were renovated as the celebration approached. For one, the Kon-

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stantinovsky Palace, a former tsarist residence on the outskirts of St. Peters-

burg, was renovated because Putin supposedly needed a “sea residence.” To-
day this site has a double name: it figures both as a presidential residence and
as the state complex Palace of Congresses.3 The most contemporary artistic
forms were mobilized for the celebration. Niro Yamagata’s laser show took
place. The lavish water festival on the Neva River, organized by a French
company, Aquatique Show International, which specializes in organizing
large-scale water spectacles around the world, was surely impressive, and,
incidentally, it consisted of two separate water shows—one for the political
leaders and other VIPs, the other for the general public. City residents, during
the week-long celebration, were “recommended” to postpone visiting reno-
vated city-centre sites and attending festivals. The concentration of police per
square meter beat all records. Pulkovo, the city airport, was closed on celebra-
tion days. There was a sense in which it was not the leader and the masses
who were supposed to unite during the celebration but the president and those
European leaders with whom he declared to have a “special relationship.”
In a sense, the present St. Petersburg authorities followed two paths. The
first was that of eighteenth-century authorities who used to close public cele-
brations and public places to people. The second was that elaborated by So-
viet-era authorities who, as a rule, “cleared” the capital of all undesirable ele-
ments during major events (e.g. the 1980 Olympiad). Surely, some of these
unpopular measures had to do with security concerns that are at their height
everywhere. But if one is allowed to be, so to speak, historically contempla-
tive, the underestimated potential of the older political systems comes to
mind. While some researchers emphasize the effectiveness of monarchy in
terms of maintaining security (cf. Ankersmit 2002), the symbolic and cere-
monial potential of feudalism and absolutism should also be remembered.

Refeudalization of the public sphere and “feudal”

tendencies in the cities

It was Jürgen Habermas who was most succinct in expressing the common
intellectual’s suspicion towards a society of spectacle and turning politics into
performance and show. This attitude has to do with the realization that what-
ever is rendered as spectacle is deprived of the critical potential for imagining
a different organization of society. The strong distinction between private and
public domains that he draws allows Habermas to picture the genuine, ideal
public sphere for which uncoerced deliberation is characteristic (cf. Villa

3 Cf. for instance the following Internet site: [Link]

en_kd.php.

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1992). Contemplating the predicament of the mass democracies of advanced

or “late” capitalist society, Habermas sees the return of “representative pub-
licity” characteristic of the Middle Ages and of absolutist society, with the
organization of society as a social hierarchy of orders or estates and the king
at the top. Thus the metaphor he uses for the contemporary erosion of the
spaces of participatory democracy and the disintegration of the public sphere
is “refeudalization.” Describing how a “culture-debating public” irretrievably
turns into a “culture-consuming public,” Habermas argues that this leads to
the transformation of publicity from a critical to a staged one. Tracing the de-
velopment of the public sphere in Europe from 1640 to 1960, Habermas
speaks of its “refeudalization,” which occurs when the illusions of the public
sphere are maintained only to give sanction to the decisions of leaders
(Habermas 1989: 164, 195, 206).
Having read this sketch today, one can’t help thinking that however rele-
vant this model is from the point of view of critical theory, it seems to be very
much at odds with the present moment when nearly everything in politics
tends to be connected to performance or spectacle. It is not by chance that
much of the criticism directed against the notion of the public sphere and its
subsequent refeudalization comes both from urbanists and media scholars.
They emphasize that the spread of mass media has radically changed the func-
tioning of the public sphere, rendering Habermas’ model “both backward
looking and too literally spatial” (Donald 2003: 51). Rather than feeling de-
prived of their share in the process of political deliberation by all sorts of
imaginers, rather than mourning over face-to-face interactions in specifically
designed public places, citizens seem happily to embrace the opportunities
that television, the Internet, and shopping malls offer. Yet I believe that it is
exactly in the field of political culture that Habermas’s concept possesses a
sufficient theoretical interest and may result in creative interpretations of the
current Russian transformations.
However, with all the reservations and doubts that come to one’s mind
about the extent to which the conclusions and qualifications that Habermas
drew from his normative consideration of late capitalist societies are applica-
ble to Russia, at least stylistic affinities between his description of refeudali-
zation and present day commemorative practices are obvious. The pompous
ceremonies of celebration marked the point in contemporary Russian history
when even the rhetorical endorsement of democratic values has stopped being
necessary and when personified power has come to the fore. Refeudalization
of the public sphere thus coincides with the ongoing re-centralization of
power. The self-reproducing body of high ranking officials, by cleverly chan-
neling generous federal donations and by managing the public during the
celebration, has impressively shown its growing independence from, and in-
difference toward, society.

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Although Habermas does not concern himself with the connections be-
tween the practices of commemoration and contemporary publicity, his de-
scription of refeudalization nevertheless raises fundamental questions about
the functioning of “image-making” in the contemporary politics of memory.
Are we to assume that most contemporary national commemorative celebra-
tions are supposed to be spectacles designed to impress rather than events to
take part in? Cultural memory is undoubtedly prone to manipulations. The
point to emphasize here is that politically informed, instrumental ways of
“image-making” penetrate the private realms of residential architecture and
interior decoration. The restored sites of imperial splendor that are imposed
on people by the present authorities seem to be enthusiastically imitated, al-
beit on a smaller scale, by well-off people in their apartments and mansions.
Red wood and golden ornaments, intricate parquet work, fine vases, and other
cultural objects of recognized material value that are predominant in carefully
created interiors not only signify changes in spending patterns but also betray
the owners’ sense of the epoch they want to relate to.
It is only when cultural, social, and economic processes are seen as mutu-
ally essential that it is possible to render the complex and interwoven tenden-
cies of urban living. The cultural logic of late capitalism (to borrow the title of
Frederic Jameson’s book) presupposes that it is the capitalist economy that is
in the center of urban development. And in post-Soviet cities one can see
many corporate buildings, commercial centers, and shopping plazas signalling
the accumulation of capital. On the other hand, the irrational, pompous lav-
ishness of these centers and plazas, and a great deal of conspicuous consump-
tion, makes one think of a totally different cultural logic, namely a feudal one
(cf. O’Connor 1995). It is not the accumulation of capital but a status differ-
entiation that finds its expression in closed enclaves and ever-present surveil-
lance, innumerous borders and walls, both physical and virtual, that were
erected during the last decade in cities, from face control in expensive night-
clubs, to “fortress” buildings and villages, from the frequency with which the
word “exclusive” is used in real estate and services ads, to the growing sense
in which it is the urban elite that builds new parts of the city for itself.
There is one more striking similarity to the feudal structuring of court and
society in general that can be traced in the present-day workings of power,
namely, the growing importance of one’s loyalty to the president, a regional
governor, a mayor, or the head of a corporation, and one’s astute sense of sub-
ordination and expectations to receive compensation in return for being loyal.
In a sense, “gated communities,” themselves reminiscent of feudal cities,
which are becoming plentiful in Russia, can be seen as the most tangible
embodiment of one’s loyalties. The meaning of refeudalization can thus be
expanded. It can serve as an indication of a number of social and cultural
trends that might not necessarily originate in “feudalism” historically but may

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be perceived as similar to “feudal” by contemporary standards. What I imply

is that the growing importance of one’s status, which is so characteristic of
post-Soviet urbanity and the obvious sophistication of the imaginers in organ-
izing events in which even the symbolic participation of the public has
stopped being necessary, is perceived by some parts of the public as the clo-
sure of the narrative of liberation under the spell of which many have lived
during the last couple of decades. The teleological promise that this narrative
contained (a blessed capitalist freedom to pursue one’s self-interest) has led to
nothing, the hopes proven lost. In this vein, speaking of the East European
countries and Russia, one can easily recall how the revolutionary energy of
the big cities’s populations became thwarted during the last decade. Today,
pragmatic urbanites are rather politically disenchanted. Busily pursuing their
individual interests, they recall their romantic expectations and democratic
aspirations of the late 1980s with a touch of irony. Squares—the former meet-
ing places of the perestroika years—are now deserted, while department
stores are crowded in the cities that are undergoing free-market reforms.
Whether the rendering of the current tendencies as feudal has to do with a
particular appeal of egalitarian ideas that many have successfully absorbed
(and thus it is especially worrying for them to contemplate the return of a so-
cial hierarchy reminiscent of the Soviet-era party-state) or with a failure of
“monarchic” sentiment mobilized by those who want to give dignity to their
positions and property by constantly evoking well-worn narratives, this needs
to be further investigated. What is clear, though, is that the ongoing conver-
sion of the “seats” in the present hierarchy of governmental power into envi-
able pieces of real estate that are camouflaged from time to time by pompous
nationalistic spectacles should be viewed as something very different from the
capitalist culture of spectacle.

Sand sculpture festival: persistence of vernacular

In the Peter and Paul Fortress (The State Museum of the History of St. Peters-
burg) the 3rd international sand sculpture festival took place. It managed to
alter the content and the image of the sight and attracted a considerable audi-
ence. The fortress was erected by Peter the Great to protect St Petersburg, but,
almost immediately after its inception it started to be used as a prison, where,
for one, Peter the Great’s son was imprisoned and died. In the nineteenth cen-
tury many political prisoners were imprisoned in the Trubetskoy Bastion, now
the Prison Museum. The fortress’ granite-covered bastions, located on an is-
land, are surrounded by the strip of sand shore. Inside the fortress, various
buildings have been converted into museums. Outside, there is a sand beach
that served as ground for the festival. Inside the cathedral are the tombs of

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Romanov emperors and empresses, including Peter the Great and Catherine
the Great. In a small room to the left of the entrance are the tombs of the last
tsar, Tsar Nicholas II, and his family.
Because it is located on the island, the site has been somewhat separated
from everyday city life and thus meets the definition of a tourist site as “predi-
cated in a binary opposition between ordinary/everyday and extraordinary”
(Urry 1990: 11). The sand sculptures festival was, I thought, a nice mixture of
ordinary and extraordinary. As a rule, it is the public monuments that, by virtue
of their durability, comprise an eternal part of city landscape that we tend not to
pay much attention to. Impermanent sculptures seem to arouse more fascina-
tion: they are expected to disappear because of wind and rain; hence one must
hurry to see them. Besides, they are not overloaded with heavy historical mean-
ings, their similarity and seriality is fun to watch. The important part of the
process of visual consumption that the sculptures prompted was that the site of
the exhibition remained crowded almost all the time that the show was on
(about one month). The sand sculptures’ appeal to the visual fascination of an
audience was enhanced not only by the popularity of the event but also for one
more reason. People sensed that these ephemeral sculptures, although undoubt-
edly devoted to the 300th anniversary (just like everything else last summer in
this city) had something to do with subverting the conventions of the monu-
ment. As one of my interlocutors put it: “Here you don’t feel oppressed, you
don’t feel that you’re supposed to pay respect to somebody noble and famous,
you can just stroll by and compare, which is also very important—to ask myself
which one I like better.”
It seems that it is a sense of being free from imposed cultural and national
values as well as of being free to choose between similar, yet nevertheless dif-
ferent, objects is what gave people a peculiar pleasure. Some of the sculptures
clearly had ideological content (e.g. a concern with the environmental situation
on the Baltic Sea), while others conveyed the sculptors’ familiarity with the
latest trend in the monumental aesthetic, namely, minimalism. Most of all, they
succeeded in creating something like an informal public place where people
obviously found it very enjoyable to be surrounded by other spectators. This
sort of art produces social processes rather than objects. It is in this context that
the organization of the sand sculpture festival can be seen as a significant act of
counterbalancing a pompous spectacle of the 300th celebration with commu-
nity-oriented art. The festival was a vehicle for capturing locally relevant im-
agery in a deliberately “low-key” way. Many interlocutors also recalled their
fond experiences at the ice festival that took place in winter, while others as-
serted that the event was “entertaining,” “funny,” and had “a sense of competi-
tion”. One woman in her late forties put it in typical terms:

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I guess living in this historical city we all are a bit tired of now predominant ambition to
build ‘for ages’ and of related irony that not everything that is supposedly built for ages lasts
long enough. So when you see these things, it gives you a totally different perspective: they
are here for months, then the material they are made from returns to where it belongs. Noth-
ing is taken from anybody. Nothing is going to turn into an eyesore that is going to stay
there forever.

I personally liked most a “politically correct” replica of Michail Schemyakin’s

monument to Peter the Great in which Peter had distinctly Yakutian features.
The author, coming from Yakutia, not only claimed his people’s—who live
deep in Siberia—right to the national holiday, but also, by re-appropriating
the problematic Schemyakin’s monument, managed to suspend the authorita-
tiveness of it. The festival also gave reasons to think that there is an important
link between reception of public art objects and photography. Photographing
themselves with the sculptures in the background was what the visitors to the
festival mostly did. One is tempted to recall here what Susan Sontag says with
regard to the reassuring effect of photography: “The very activity of taking
pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation. Unsure of
other responses, they take a picture” (Sontag 1977: 10). In the context of an
open-air exhibition, these photographic rituals, again, served as a way to con-
nect people’s experience of public place with their everyday activities, with
sharing their leisure time with friends and families. In a sense, what those
sculptures were depicting was not important since people seemed to take their
viewing of the sculptures as part of the overall weekend experience.
Interestingly enough, in some of the regular St. Petersburg courtyards that
are slightly embellished in the tradition of trash art, we can see even more ver-
nacular versions of the celebration. The pieces installed are made from the
relics of Soviet times: vinyl discs, old radios, tires, children’s clothing, etc.
These courtyards, however gloomy, unpolished, and sometimes plain crum-
bling they might seem to a stranger, are something that the locals cherish and
are not always ashamed of. As the process of globalization extends, the lan-
guage and rhetoric of advertising becomes more and more universal. It sets, as
Malcolm Miles is certainly right to assert, “a conceptual as well as technical
standard against which public art is not always successful in competing” (1997:
25). The circulation of video clips and desires, the traffic of people and signs,
the world bazaar of commodities—all this seems to render local peculiarities
and struggles obsolete. Nevertheless, under these circumstances it is getting
even more important to look for the ways in which the now predominant ideas
of globalization are taken with a grain of salt. They are not resisted since, in
fact, there is nothing to resist: the practices of transnational corporations are
increasingly obtaining a force comparable with that of the laws of nature. They
are either simply ignored or rearticulated within what might be called counter-
narratives or countersites in which both the oddness and sheer familiarity of
traditional local life, with its outdated artifacts and useless items, is preserved.

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If St. Petersburg authorities tend to exploit once-held stereotypes of their

city and its “cultural treasures,” other agents of cultural industry look for dif-
ferent ways to enhance the residents’ sensibilities and provide them with new
ways and spaces to experience the city.

Co n c l u s i o n

The challenge one faces in describing politics of memory is to keep an eye

both on macrosocial structures and microsocial behaviors, both on “hard”
facts related to finances and politics and imaginative investments in cultures
past and present, both on iconological data and the impressions of the passers-
by. What I’ve tried to do is exactly that, a sort of juxtaposition of meanings
that can be excavated from, on the one hand, an officially arranged and offi-
cially celebrated St. Petersburg anniversary, and, on the other, its vernacular
forms. I have suggested that spatial, memorial, and artistic practices employed
by the authorities betray a growing traditionalism of the Russian political re-
gime. The post-modern eclecticism the celebration embodied seemed quite
compatible with strategies of managing the public by the authoritarian leader
and his bureaucratic environment. On the other hand, in spite of the growing
authoritarianism and hierarchy in social and political relations that enact dis-
torted, negative publicities (rendered by Jürgen Habermas as “representative
ones”), other lines of influences and modes of interactions with the past could
be discerned in the context of celebration. “Low-key” art forms that were in-
troduced by several groups of city artists and curators may be seen as defying
both appropriation of urban and national past by the state and cultural elitism.
Thus this kind of public art figures as genuine urban practice capable of pro-
ducing an engaging, informal, even witty response to the concrete event. It
remains to be seen whether future political developments will allow the com-
bination of state-imposed national narratives with other stories, and whether
submerged memories will be able to continue rising to the surface of public
interest.

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Re f e r e n c e s

Ankersmit, Frank R. (2002) “Representational Democracy. An Aesthetic Ap-

proach to Conflict and Compromise”. Common Knowledge 8/1, pp. 9–22.
Boym, Svetlana (2001) “Nostalgia, Moscow Style”. Harvard Design Maga-
zine 13, pp. 1–8.
Donald, James (2003) “The Immaterial City”. In Garry Bridge/Sophie Watson
(eds.) A Companion to the City Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 46–54.
Habermas, Jürgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Realm,
trans. Thomas Berger, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Miles, Malcolm (1997) Art, Space and the City. Public Art and Urban Fu-
tures, London: Routledge.
O’Connor, Richard (1995) “Indigenous Urbanism: Class, City and Society in
Southeast Asia”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26/1, pp. 30–45.
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Thrift, Nigel/Crang, Mike (2000) “Introduction”. In Mike Crang/Nigel Thrift
(eds.) Thinking Space, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–27.
Trenin, Dmitrii (2004) “Identichnost i integratsia: Rossia i Zapad v 21 veke”.
Pro et Contra 8/3, pp. 9–22.
Trubina, Elena (2005) “Dreihundertjahrfeier in St. Petersburg”. StadtBauwelt
24, pp. 24–34.
Villa, Dana R. (1992) “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere”. The American
Political Science Review 86/3, pp. 712–721.
Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage.

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Refle ctions on a C artograph y of the
N on- Visibl e. U rb an Exp eri en ce and t he Int ern et

MARC RIES

In the first part I will investigate the intertwining of modern, conflict-ridden

urban experience with the non-visible, defined here as both motor and effect
of urbanity. In the second part, diverse “illumination techniques” will be dis-
cussed in a historical perspective. In the third and major part, the Internet
will then be analysed as such a technique of visibility, together with city rep-
resentations on the Web as a media performance of the urban and its conflict
management.

This text tries to trace the present urban experience and the conflicts it copes
with in relation to the medium of the Internet in two ways. First, urban expe-
rience will be discussed as a confrontation with the non-visible, the invisible.
Then urban experience and its conflict management will be sketched as a—
possible—performance of a media urbanity of the Web.

The city represents the central settlement point for all driving forces of mod-
ernity. Invisibility is one of its essential properties, it is at once motor and re-
sult of urban development. I will briefly sketch a few invisibilities: The influx
of ever more people into towns leads to concentrations of urban building, to
proliferation at the peripheries, but also to the founding of new—so-called—
industrial towns. Planned and shaped from other social viewpoints, their large
proportions are not comprehensible for the individual. One neither knows nor

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travels in other more distant parts of a town; one has merely a vague inkling
of their size and density, much remains unknown, unfamiliar. This experience
is one of constructed invisibility.
“The inclusion form of the modern also brings out a specific form of in-
visibility which is expressed in the structural alienation of town-dwellers from
each other,” Armin Nassehi (2002: 228) writes, thereby formulating a basic
ambivalence of modernity. In the creation of large spaces—represented by
railway stations, shopping streets and malls, stadiums, and parks, which imply
a coexistence side-by-side of completely different people—no scenarios of
togetherness, participation, or coincidence are considered during the planning
process. This social invisibility is the cause of endless tensions, anxieties, and
phobias, and is revealed in the socio-architectural extremes of gated commu-
nities on the one hand and slums on the other.
Cities endow capital with a face. The abstractness and lack of quality of
money, of the universal equivalent, is brought to an unusual sensuality in the
exhibited surplus of the trading centres, in the extravagance of the shops and
malls. But the staging of goods is at the same time evidence of powers that
remain incomprehensible for the individual. Behind the illusion of merchandise
ticks the invisible regulation mechanism of accumulation, the capital markets.
As the last invisiblity I would cite that of the political powers and their in-
stitutions, that of the administration apparatus, which, following the founda-
tion of nation-states, cultivate their ugly displays of Moloch-like bureaucra-
cies. Life is administered by invisible forces.
Together with the non-visible, something else features large in modern
urban life—the secretive. Georg Simmel points out that the “secret – the con-
cealment of realities by positive or negative means – […] is one of the great-
est mental achievements of humanity. […] The secret offers so to speak the
possibility of a second world beside the manifest one, and the one is influ-
enced by the other in the strongest fashion” (Simmel 1906).
At the start of modern urban development, Leibniz draws on the concept
of the city to relate his philosophical system’s qualities to an experience of the
real world. In his “Monadology” the city acts as a metaphor for the existence
of different and manifold universes.

The same town looked at from different angles appears completely different, and is, as it
were, multiplied perspectively. In the same way, it emerges that, because of the infinite
number of simple substances, there seem to be as many different universes as there are sub-
stances. However, these are only different perspectives on a single universe, according to
the different points of view of each monad. (Leibniz 1999)

The scheme of urban experience is possibly most clearly depicted in the “cub-
istic town.” Its rendering, like Robert Delaunay’s “Simultaneous Window on
the Town” (1912), rejoices in the dissolution of the directed gaze, of the

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promise of survey and order; it is a direct illustration of the constitutive mod-

ern experience of withdrawal of orientation in living space, of forsaking tradi-
tion, of the entry of contingency into the world’s inner space. The picture cele-
brates complexity and lack of clarity, affirms the removal of limits and destabi-
lisation.
The multiplicity of a city’s perspectives, that is, the awareness of its own
“secretive” life, makes it impossible for the individual inhabitant to see the
city as a whole. Many parts of it—whether in fact town-parts or rather urban
processes and differentiations—necessarily remain invisible to the individual
gaze. The urban product is per se set in a dialectic of visibility and invisibil-
ity. To summarise: the city also spans all that cannot be seen; better: that can-
not be experienced. Invisibility means inability of experience, means igno-
rance as an epistemic fracture.

II

In order to counteract this, the early modern age already programmed numer-
ous techniques of visualisation, of rendering visible, and also of rationalising.
They were intended to at least help to simulate—or to substitute for by means
of sign systems—a view of the whole. However, this development is always
one between enlightenment and hegemony. In answering the question “By
what results can the truth of enlightenment be recognised?” Martin Christoph
Wieland replied:

when it becomes altogether brighter; when the number of people thinking, inquiring and
searching for light in general […] becomes larger and larger, and the mass of prejudices and
illusory concepts visibly smaller and smaller; when, unnoticed, the shame of ignorance and
irrationality, the longing for useful knowledge and particularly respect in the face of human
nature and its rights grows in all classes (Wieland 1996: 81).

This leads us to illumination techniques, which, and this is essential for me,
are always techniques of space as well. They evoke a redefinition of urban
space, expand, and indeed establish its specific use. To begin with, the first
town maps are worth mentioning, for instance the “New Plan of Rome” of
1748 by Giambattista Nolli, the first modernist among town planners. Com-
pared to city views in earlier maps (for example, Michel Turgot’s Paris map
of 1734), Nolli created desensualized, objectivised overviews. His map shows
the town as an abstract ground plan for the planner’s eye. The plan divides
space into a texture by dichotomy, into a mass of places for living and work-
ing defined by similarity and repetition, which he depicts in black, and into a
certain quantity of objects, monuments, and traffic routes, which accommo-
date all forms of public in exterior and interior space; these he depicts in

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white. These actually appear empty and unmarked; one could also say they
are “invisible.” On the one hand, Nolli’s plan is a first attempt at introducing
visibility by means of a rational order, allowing the inhabitant to find orienta-
tion and an overview. On the other hand, the cartographic description of pub-
lic space as indeterminate is an uncertainty relation, an organism of unknown
variables. The public nature of the street is charted here as a space for moving
and conveying, which brings about for the user contact with an unpredictable
number of what are for him surprising, unknown and foreign elements en-
gaged in constant change (cf. Ries 2002).
Peter Eisenman’s study of an “Architecture of Absence” also revealed
elements of an “Architecture of Invisibility.” As in Giovanni Battista Pi-
ranesi’s “Plan of the Campo Marzio” of 1748:

Piranesi uses the Rome that was extant in the 18th century as a starting point, but it pos-
sesses no original value; it is merely a being in the present. From this existential moment of
being, he takes buildings that existed in the 1st and 2nd centuries, in Imperial Rome, and
places them in the same framework of time and space as the 18th century. Next, Piranesi
moves monuments of the 1st century from their actual location to other locations, as if these
were their actual sites in the 18th century. Piranesi also proposes buildings that never ex-
isted. They seem at first glance to be memoires of buildings that could have existed be-
cause they look like buildings until one examines them for their function. […] the ground
becomes an interstitial trace between objects, traces that exist in both time and space. […] it
is a multiple palimpsest, a series of overlays that mix fact with fiction. (Eisenman 2004: 84-
85)

Eisenman redefines the map as a “diagram,” which comes into operation as a

“template of possibilities” against a “metaphysics of presence.”
Not only the city plans are of interest; the empirical, statistical procedures
introduced by the administrations, the tables, lists, and diagrams (the birth and
death statistics, the map of the metro, the telephone directory etc.) also create
regulation systems. Maps, lists, and diagrams do not make a town easier to
experience, but by showing some of its measurable and decipherable charac-
teristics they can offer the inhabitant at least a partial orientation by means of
these visualisations.
It is analytical images and data, functional images that help to make the
“the city’s space system” accessible, that attempt to convert the invisible into
legible, visible values.
I will not look into all the other countless illuminating techniques that
make the city brighter, more readily available, and meaningful, for example
electrification, the visual guidance systems that run through towns, or video
surveillance. Rather, I concentrate on the “absolute” image of the city as of-
fered by the Internet today. Websites are functional images that are capable of
more than of just providing data. As media performance, they help to redefine
urbanity and offer completely new models of complexity of experience, while
simultaneously enhancing the status of social space.

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 REFLECTIONS ON A CARTOGRAPHY OF THE NON-VISIBLE

III

Nowadays everything social is represented on the Internet, or potentially

available there as the medium’s artefact. In this respect the Internet is a uni-
versal medium permitting the reverse argumentation: The Web embodies the
totality of everything social, it is the “pure social.”
The same applies to cities: Today each and every one of them is function-
ally duplicated in manifold ways. It is, however, important that instead of
merely doubling reality, new spaces of perception and action are created. Only
the Internet—as a participatory medium aiming at a rich diversity—is capable
of comprehensively exhibiting the different urban systemic spaces and of in-
fluencing them. In a common argumentation of sociology, the category of
projection is used to extract correlations or derivations, as in the following
thesis: “Residential segregation is the projection of social inequality into (ur-
ban) space” (Häußermann/Siebel 2002: 33). It could also be said: Segregation
is the representation of inequality in space.
This way of thinking presupposes that space itself is inactive and “endur-
ing” something. The same happens in argumentations within media theory that
reduce media to simple representations of society. When applied to the Inter-
net, the conclusion could then read: social inequality is projected into the In-
ternet and likewise shapes segregation there: Migrants have their own little
sites which stand in the shade of the mighty, official sites. So is the Internet
just a static mirror image of society or the urban? I would suggest four coun-
terarguments to that.
Universal medium: in its capacity for displaying the social and making it
visible world-wide, the Internet is a universal medium. Based on its universal
availability and on its omni-perspective and dialogic constitution, the Web
embodies the pure social. The Web is always larger than its individual usage.
Space differentiation: Internet practice aims at a variety of space, at space
differentiation—but without hierarchies, without ownership structures or ine-
qualities. It fosters a media juxtaposition, a coexistence of individual, com-
munal, institutional, and capital interests that facilitate other, and considerably
more, things than any factual coexistence in the “real” town or “real” world
does.
Process differentiation within space differentiation: the Internet offers the
most diverse programmes of exchange, communication, coincidence: from
correspondence by forms to P2P, from mailing lists and chat rooms to Web
logs. This interaction differentiation advances specialisation and individuali-
sation to an extent no other medium previously did.
Contingency: on account of its link structure, that is, its hypertext logic, the
Internet is in a position to deliver the unwanted, the unpredictable, the new to

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its user. It introduces him to the understanding that, as Luhmann noted, “eve-
rything can also be different.”
With this argumentation the Web establishes its own space, a socio-media
space that is part of the geoaesthetics of the media. The geoaesthetics of the
Internet relates to the audio-visual construction and communicative linking of
social spaces, their perception, and dealing with them. Every city representa-
tion is the expression of such geoaesthetics of the Web. Like no other me-
dium, the Internet potentiates a media performance of the urban. I will focus
on the official city representations on the Web. It is necessary to distinguish
between three characteristics of the Web.
City representations on the Internet are self-presentations in the sense of a
demonstration of administrative complexity on the one hand and of function
differentiations of the urban on the other. The entire administration of town
institutions is made visible. At the same time, societal forces, which help con-
stitute towns, are displayed: the economy, together with work and the labour
market, the culture and the spectacle, the history of the town with its housing,
living, and progressing.
In parallel to these representation scenarios, individual action potentials
are offered for navigation within the complexity and the differentiation. First,
orientation is promised: What are the overall possibilities and institutions,
what services are at one’s disposal? Second, knowledge is provided: What do
the individual sections provide, what contents do they offer? And third, oper-
ating guidelines are offered: How must I organise myself, how must I behave
in order to achieve this or that?
These three action potentials mainly concern contact with administrations
or public services, but also those areas dealing with troubles and problems,
such as emergency services, self-help groups, certain associations. Naviga-
tion, however, also needs a search function connecting to a database whose
keywords can be called up by a “search” or “research” function. These data-
bases quickly reveal whether the sites do in fact cover the full extent of the
urban, civil landscape and also include fields of conflict, or whether the po-
litical interest merely consists in vain self-representation. Consequently, this
function brings about a change of direction: not what one does not know is
searched for, but rather what the database does not know, or does not want to
know, is scrutinised.
Apart from these Web offerings, another quite different innovative func-
tion comes into play: that of a new public space. For the first time in the his-
tory of mass media, the Internet comes forward as a media system that turns
all receivers into producers and transmitters, and its participative dimension
inaugurates a “media world public,” developing completely independent, sov-
ereign structures of interchange and communication. This concerns the mes-
saging boards, the mailing lists, the chat forums, the websites built up by in-

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 REFLECTIONS ON A CARTOGRAPHY OF THE NON-VISIBLE

dividuals, groups, communities, the content management systems, the Web

logs, the P2P systems. These “coincidence techniques” turn the netizens into
an audience, a media public whose sovereignty affirms the Web as a democ-
ratic institution.
Official city pages are thus intended to offer discursive interfaces for po-
litical communication, but also to grant visual access to all those pages that
reflect town life and urban conflicts on the part of civil actors. It is astonish-
ing to observe that official city sites almost entirely reject this participative
dimension of the Web—they represent and give directions, but are not pre-
pared to enter into a discursive, public debate on the multiplicity of urban
conflicts with individual citizens, associations, or initiative groups. Apart from
providing necessary resources, politicians and officials need to prepare for an
active communication with citizens—and not just to summon them to the bal-
lot box. The urban landscape of conflict is in need of just these media inter-
faces in order to counteract the one-sided power gradient—in the sense of a
genuine participatory democracy (Claus Leggewie).
But is there not an error here in my own observation and expectation?
Why should the town of Darmstadt’s administrative website want more than
to keep with its designated definition of just being administrative? On the other
hand: Is this not a somewhat abbreviated concept of politics? The Web is per
se a decentrally configured structure, and so there will always be various
manifestations, options of visibility, alternatives to the “official clearing,”
which in fact also leaves much in the dark, or proceeds to place it there. Many
conflicts do not take place on the local level alone, or cannot be represented
there; rather, they expand out into many regions and towns, and, above all,
they hardly are of local origins. Problems like migration, segregation, unem-
ployment, poverty, and gender inequality are global issues and concerns. The
Internet is at its most impressive when interconnecting translocally.

IV

For it is the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a
far-flung national or international area. […] The most significant characteristic of the me-
tropolis is this functional extension beyond its physical boundaries. And this efficacy reacts
in turn and gives weight, importance, and responsibility to metropolitan life. Man does not
end with the limits of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather [it] is
the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally
and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its
immediate confines. (Simmel 1950)

When Simmel wrote this, the city represented the only “expert system” for the
non-visible, the complex, the differentiating out of systems. Today things are
different. The “web of the webs” is no town. Yet it has become an expert sys-

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MARC RIES

tem for the non-visible. The “inner life” of the Internet consists of all the
computers connected worldwide, of all the sites on all the computers world-
wide. That is, the Web possibly epitomises the formula of “world inner
space,” as reported by Hardt/Negri’s political philosophy, or by Peter Sloter-
dijk’s historical anthropology. To rethink the whole world as an inner space,
as an interior which we can never look at from the outside, but in which we
should freely roam. By means of the Internet, for example. Its “functional ex-
tension” results from the possibility for a connected individual to perceive all
other connected individuals or institutions or power centres, and perhaps to
communicate with them. The Internet does not function like geographical
space with a Here and There, but rather like a purely relational space where
there is exclusively a Here and Now. For the data stream every individual in-
terface is at every moment the centre of the world. Yet every Internet site can
indeed be measured by the “sum of effects emanating from [it] temporally and
spatially.” A site like [Link] thus obtains its legitimacy from its
urban quality of reaching as many people in the world’s inner space as is pos-
sible—not only in Iran, but also world-wide. Being part of the Web means
being part of an urbanity, understood as a life form.

Re f e r e n c e s

Eisenman, Peter (2004) “Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A critical analysis”. In

Peter Noever (eds.) Peter Eisenman. Barfuss auf weiss glühenden Mau-
ern/Barefoot on White-Hot Walls, Wien: Hatje Cantz , p. 84–85.
Häußermann, Hartmut/Siebel, Walter (2002) “Die Mühen der Differenzierung”.
In Martina Löw (eds.) Differenzierungen des Städtischen, Opladen: Leske +
Budrich, p. 27–67.
Leibniz, Gottfried W. (1999) The Monadology. Trans. George MacDonald
Ross. [Link]
monadology/[Link]#m56.
Nassehi, Armin (2002) “Dichte Räume. Städte als Synchronisations- und In-
klusionsmaschinen”. In Martina Löw (eds.) Differenzierungen des Städ-
tischen, Opladen: Leske + Budrich, p. 211–232.
Ries, Marc(2002) “Wrong Way. Zur Darstellbarkeit nachmoderner Städte im
zeitgenössischen Hollywood-Kino am Beispiel Los Angeles”. In Medi-
enkulturen, Wien: Sonderzahl, p. 158–171.
Simmel, Georg (1906) “Das Geheimnis. Eine sozialpsychologische Skizze”.
In Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908 Band II, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, p. 317. See also: Simmel, Georg (1906) “The Sociology of Se-
crecy and of Secret Societies”. In American Journal of Sociology 11, p.
441–498.

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Simmel, Georg (1950) “The Metropolis and Mental Live”. ed. and trans. by
D. Weinstein/Kurt Wolff The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: Free
Press, pp. 409–424. [Link]
[Link].
Wieland, Christoph Martin (1996) “A Couple of Gold Nuggets, from the
Wastepaper, or Six Answers to Six Questions”. In James Schmidt (eds.)
What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-
Century Questions, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 78–83.

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Pict uring U rban Identitie s

SERGEJ STOETZER

Images of cities play a key role in the formation of urban identity, producing
specific spaces and sometimes leaving traces of that process behind, inscribed
in material artefacts specific to places. Picturing urban identities is a new
method of mapping the linkages between specific places, the production of
space, and visualising the basis of the construction of urban identity as highly
specific to place, media image, and acting.

The images of cities created by professionals, as well as by individual actors,

play a key role in the formation of urban identity. Professional images are
oriented towards media distribution in campaigns used to convey a precise
picture of what should be regarded as specific to the city in the eyes of the
beholder.
Besides these intended images, subjective ones arise from the perception
of urban space, experiences, memories, and ideas, building tension between
the individual constitution of urban space and the adoption of a pre-arranged
mixture of symbols, historical issues, visual artefacts, and narratives produced
intentionally. The individual actor’s urban identity, his/her mental image of
the city, is formed from this tension.
The subjective image of the city is reconstructed using visual and narra-
tive empirical data from students at Darmstadt, where these processes of ne-
gotiating identities are studied. The city’s official imagineering is analysed
utilizing its Web presence, focusing especially on Darmstadt as a “city of sci-
ence.”
The theoretical aim behind this is to integrate concepts of place-based
identity with a sociological perspective on the constitution of space as a social

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process that involves action and structure, materiality and atmospheres, as-
cribing both subjective and perceived preconfigured characteristics to places
—to the urban realm.
Four main aspects will therefore be addressed here: place-marketing, with
a tendency towards homogenisation; concepts of identity and place; the newly
elaborated methodical framework for analysing processes of attributing mean-
ing to specific places while constituting space, and, finally, first findings
about a way to integrate the different theoretical approaches to place, space,
and identity.

Place-marketing and homogenisation

Place-marketing as a metaphor describes a promotional strategy that arises

from the quest for locational competitiveness with the shift from the manage-
rialist mode of urban governance to the entrepreneurial one caused by the de-
cline of the Fordist model of mass production—but it is not its hour of birth:

Figure 1: Darmstadt 1914

(Darmstädter Kunstjahr 1914, Reclams Universum Sonderheft, Leipzig 1914)

Portrayals of Darmstadt in 1914 intend to address cultural and recreational

aspects of a city beautifully integrated into the natural environment, mediated
both textually as well as pictorially—with the smokestacks of the industrial
complexes deliberately minimized to near insignificance (Schott 1999).
Place-marketing is aimed at the projection of intentionally produced im-
ages to external audiences and local populations, bringing together two not
always compatible objectives: Next to the attraction of capital investment,
consumer spending, and highly skilled migrants, it is also addressed to the
internal audience, the citizens, seeking to legitimse regeneration and devel-
opment policies and increasing social cohesion in times of an increasingly
divided an segregated city (Griffith 1989).
Place-marketing becomes difficult in a globalised world, with communi-
cation technologies making the functional differences between places less
important, while reducing the “quality of authentic places” to simple location

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factors (Hassenpflug 1999), so greater effort is spent on differentiating them

by increasing their symbolic value: The fear of not being noticed drives the
quest for achieving symbolic advantage over other competing cities. This is
done by creating city-myths—reimaging or visionary strategies, or referring
to the city’s great narratives (Griffith 1989).
Publicity and advertising have been important factors in place-marketing,
though the budget used for them seems to be very small compared to other
forms of commercial advertising, and local authorities seem to be the main
actors here, not international advertising agencies. They tend to communicate
less information about functional qualities and emphasise material artefacts
(or the materiality of the city) for its symbolic loading. The logic behind this
idea is that “rooted” materiality gives competitive advantages in a “space of
flows” (images of cities, information about them) because of its (relative)
immobility.
A strong tendency towards homogenisation and convergence in the adver-
tising strategies can be observed, both in what is included and excluded from
the imaginary created for these purposes—downplaying or silencing problems
and portraying only highly selective versions of a place’s history.
The creation of new urban landscapes by flag-ship buildings supports this
tendency, as the services of very few superstar-architects are used to create
the symbolic and material atmospheres desired for creating upscale lifestyle
enclaves. The gap between anticipated and preferred living conditions, how-
ever, has been revealed in different studies, e.g. by Peter Noller and Klaus
Ronneberger (1995). Next to the architecture of superlatives, more subtle
ways can be found by renaming places, or by theming urban landscape from a
selection of “premixed design packages that reproduce pre-existing urban
forms,” as Boyer (1992) describes it (p. 184; cit. from Griffith (1989)).
(Re)arrangements of people and social goods found in architectural drawings
showing the intended “users” and trying to locate the virtual building in its
later environment may lead to homogenising pictorial representations of
buildings not even built yet by the use of templates provided within the soft-
ware used during the design process (Löw 2003). This thesis can be extended
to visual representations of an actual built environment, the city, in electronic
media in the context of professional production of images for place-promotion
purposes.
From a critical point of view, place-marketing has been targeted because
of its ideological effects, its highly speculative nature, and the socially regres-
sive consequences. The criticism of its ideological bias is rooted in the virtue
of the idea itself: the manipulation of meanings and perceptions in order to
suggest specific prearranged ensembles of people and social goods said to be
specific to the promoted place for the individual’s production of space.

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There is, of course, a tension between the desired effects and the way the ad-
dressed local publics perceive the strategies developed by the city’s authorities,
making any simplistic assumptions of cause-action impossible: Given the possi-
bility of different “readings” from the local public, it is nowadays even easier for
individual actors or marginalised groups to address electronic image campaigns,
showing their rejection of the official portrayal, and to make their own interpreta-
tion of the places’ history visible,1 even if this includes showing the opposite of
what official image campaigns try to do: to make the city look good.
A shimmering example of that conflict can be found online: Halle is a
quite old city with a remarkable history in (higher) education and fine arts,
known for its reform university during the Enlightenment. It is also known for
the environmental problems caused by a huge chemical industry located
nearby—and an increasing rate of unemployment caused by the decline of
that industry after the Wall came down.
The conflicts arising between the official representation of the city (show-
ing cultural and historic sites on virtual tours: [Link]) and a group of
six people targeting this representation in quite cynical ways, starts with the
name of the city’s “different” representation, connecting the city’s name Halle
with a phonetically similar one, Hoelle, meaning hell ([Link]).
Starting with pictures of incivilities, desolated buildings, and characteris-
ing the city’s problems as one of shrinkage, the website shows a counter an-
nouncing the estimated number of citizens, but going backwards, extrapolat-
ing that the last citizen will have left in 11959 days due to a decline of nine
citizens per day. It is no wonder that the city has tried several times to shut
down this website, though it has had only temporary success.
Given the uncertainty of place-marketing, it is reasonable to limit these risks
by re-using concepts that seemed to be effective elsewhere—leading to the
homogenisation of media campaigns and to pictorial representations of cities
using very similar visual methods. This logic of careful competition may
seem reasonable at first, avoiding spending (public) money on speculative
promotion strategies when it could be very well used elsewhere, but it is com-
promised by a deep internal contradiction:
In a globalising world, with the importance of being noticed, cities need to
stress their specificity on the one hand, while being careful in doing so on the
other because of the highly speculative nature of place-marketing, allowing
only slight changes from the path other cities seemed to have walked success-
fully. They find themselves between the poles of an imperative for differentia-
tion and an imperative for uniformity (Griffith 1989).

1 Cf. Escobar (2001) trying to leave the dichotomizing debate on the local and the
global behind by introducing “concepts that are useful for ascertaining the supra-
place effects of place-based politics, such as network and glocality” (p. 142) and
empowering the defence of place-based identities and practices in contexts of
globalization.

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T he or eti c al c o n ce pt u alis ati o n s of i de nti ty a n d pl a c e

In the same context of globalisation that is said to have an intrinsic potential

of homogenising images of places, they themselves are contemplated with
different importance both theoretically in the discourse as well as practically
in everyday life. Abstract connections between specific places, highly net-
worked cities constitute powers of a different scale and quality, the global
cities, on the one hand, while others disappear from the scene, forming the
hinterworlds (Taylor 2001).
Theoretical conceptualisations of place often refer to four interplaying
phenomena: to non-material ones as atmosphere, meanings, feelings, or
memories of experiences specific to places, to activities, to the social envi-
ronment, and to materiality2 in situ (models of: Relph 1976, Canter 1997 with
an emphasis on materiality, action, experience, and scale, Agnew 1987).
Place identity can then be understood as the person’s socialisation with
the physical world, which is an intrinsic characteristic of a general socialisa-
tion process, not as two opposing or non-related processes.3
Peter Gerlach (1997) describes an empirical study of spatially related
processes of identity formation conducted in Berlin. Profiling the constitution
of individual identities in relation to spatial contexts, he identifies three dif-
ferent levels of complexity of people’s spatial appropriation, identifying spa-
tial appraisal patterns as playing a key role in the process of an emerging
identification with a place.
Doreen Massey (1994) warns about the misleading potential of common-
sensical conceptions of place that can result in even reactionary conclusions—
especially when thinking about place and identity in spatial terms of territorial
boundaries naturalising the complex processes of building and establishing
spatial links to a blood-and-soil theorem. She suggests a “progressive sense of
place” that considers places as networked intersections, characteristic because
of its local intrinsic specificity as well as its links in different spatial scales.
Her idea harmonises with the concept of space Martina Löw (2001) has
elaborated, and which is the theoretical framework for the analysis presented:
By conceptualizing space as a relational setting of human beings and social
things with the power of structuring social behaviour, while at the same time
being structured and modified itself by perception and action, Löw found a
new way of thinking about space. The sociology of space goes beyond the

2 Hidalgo/Hernández (2001) stress the importance of analysing them in conjunc-

tion with each other since most studies about attachment to place(s) have only
considered the social environment at a spatial scale and concept of neighbour-
hood only.
3 Cf. Twigger-Rosss/Uzzell (1996) for details on their critiques about this separa-
tion of a socialisation process.

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dualism of absolute versus relativistic definitions of space (space as a con-

tainer; space as constructed in the human mind only) and differentiates be-
tween two primary processes—synthesis and spacing, both recursive and in-
terwoven, representing the two dimensions of space: structure and agency.
Places are simultaneously the sources and the intention of the constituting
processes: Meanings and attributes are attached to places by spatial links:
Elements and people found in situ are synthesised along with perceptions of
the materiality, memories, thoughts, and feelings according to their signifi-
cance for the individual actor—interwoven with placing oneself in the situa-
tion in relation to the rearranged elements found there.
As a consequence, a new methodical design was developed to be able to
capture specific fragments of this highly complex and perpetuating process—
dealing with the inscription of meaning to places by establishing meaningful
connections (“links“) between elements found in situ, every day experiences,
memories, ideas, and prearranged images—for analytical purposes.

Methodical and methodological issues

Reconsidering methodical issues related to the reconstruction of the individ-

ual, subjective “image of the city” (Lynch 1965), a wide range of visual meth-
ods such as video documentary, ethnographical description of visited places,
and mental maps is applicable. Kevin Lynch used the latter one combined
with interviews and observation of places in his prominent five-year study of
Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles in the 1960s, identifying five key ele-
ments shaping the spatial mental representation of a city: paths, edges, districts,
nodes, and landmarks.
Due to the methodical uncertainties involved in using mental maps or
sketch maps as empirical data,4 the crucial element of the reconstruction proc-
ess is to achieve a visualisation based on the individual actors’ mental image
of the city, which includes pictorial definitions of urban space significant for
identity formation next to narrative representations (interviews) of the city.5
Visual representations of cities are of course an important discourse in ar-
chitecture, arts, and geography and have become more important in other dis-

4 Mental maps, however, suffer from reliability issues and are quite problematic to
analyse, since tracing contortions between the city-map and the drawn sketch
map as a material representation of the internal mental map to underlying causes
is highly vague (Downs/Stea 1982; May, 1992). Thomas Sieverts (1997) argues
similarly and urgently recommends review of the literature from other involved
disciplines as well, especially the psychology of perception.
5 Dietrich Hartmann (1989) identified three main techniques of narrative descrip-
tion of cities: the list, the map, and the imaginary walking tour (p. 80)—
differentiated by their spatial knowledge.

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 PICTURING URBAN IDENTITIES

ciplines over the last years, e.g. informatics and computer science. Their in-
terests lie in the realisation of digital, visual representations of actual cities
and the simulation of vital functions provided within them.
There are a number of ways to realise digital representations on the Inter-
net, ranging from complex rendering approaches based on the geometric data
of buildings to the use of panoramic scenes from a static viewpoint.
The approach used in this study is based on a network of photos derived
from the actual town, an interactive collage with links between the pictorial
representations of actual places. It was intended for the creation of digital cit-
ies by individual actors, allowing them to share their own experiences moder-
ated visually, or show memorable sights to other people publicly on the Net,
allowing the building of digital representations from scratch with the fewest
barriers possible – like a grass-roots visualisation of the actor’s city (Ta-
naka/Arikawa 2001).

To analyse subjective images of the city, students were asked to take photos
of their town, Darmstadt, and to link them with this software to create an in-
teractive collage.
Linking the pictures is done by identifying persons, objects, or even parts
of the picture itself on at least another one: The corresponding areas of the
photo are chosen by the actor and then linked according to the persons or ob-
jects they both have in common—or that should be considered as belonging to
each other (symbolic loading).

Figure 2 a/b: Linking corresponding areas

2a) detaillisation purpose, 2b) shift of atmosphere
(both taken from empirical basis, second collage presented). © Sergej Stoetzer

The links between the pictures are spatial relations, attached with meaning by
the actors’ selection (of what to link and in which ways).
Following the links, the photos will be crossfaded, allowing the impression
of walking through the collage, or the city, just by choosing the next among the
linked pictures. The possibilities of navigating and exploring this digital city
are framed by the structure of the collage itself, by the shape of the network
emerging from the links between the pictures.

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The task given to the students as participants explicitly dealt with the
specificity of place and the need for a kind of serial photography, allowing
easier linking afterwards. Similar to film-making, they had to prepare a story-
board beforehand to sharpen the idea of what to show of “their Darmstadt” for
its digital representation. Considering the complex possibilities of overlapping
constructions of space, the chosen topic was anticipated while the serial pho-
tography took place, assuring that the range of choices—which elements be-
tween different pictures could be chosen for the collage later to fit the topic—
would be narrowed down while being at the specific place taking pictures.
This instant selection at the “place of action” is a methodological trick to keep
influences (e.g. atmospheres, conflicting or overlapping spaces) on this proc-
ess place- and time-specific, meaning that the subsequent linking only “me-
chanically” reproduces the selection processes that took place in the city’s
realm, adding no further complexity to the production of space.

In order to be able to compare the levels of analysis between the reconstruc-

tion of the actor’s image of the city based on the visual data (photos, collage)
and the actor’s own description of that visual representation and its intended
effects, an interview was conducted after the photos were taken and the inten-
tion (the “storyboard”) was requested in writing. Triangulating the pictures
taken by the students with the collage and the interview itself is now possible.
Analysis of the webpage is done on three levels, starting with formal ar-
rangements and contents. In the final step, content and formal analyses are cross-
referenced, identifying the support or lowering of intended meaning(s) and
structure.
In the following, that comparism will be narrowed down to the image of
Darmstadt as a city of science, an official title that was granted to Darmstadt
by the Ministry of the Interior of the state Hessen in 1997. The official web-
site of the city devotes one navigational reference to Darmstadt being a city of
science, listing the research centres located in the city, as well a the research
carried out in local enterprises. Interestingly, the students are excluded from
this conceptualisation, they are not perceived by the local public or the press
in this context—notwithstanding their contribution to a city of science as re-
vealed by a recent study from Beate Krais and Maja Suderland (2004)—just
the university is mentioned, of course, among the other research centres. It
will therefore be interesting to find out what references students draw from
this concept of their city.

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Examples from the empirical base of the study

The two portraits of Darmstadt that are introduced in the next passage have
the following in common: First, Darmstadt was attributed with negative
imaginations, like “ugly city” or the buildings were described as “architec-
tonic malformation”6, but as time passed this attitude changed.
Instead of using the interactive collages themselves, an overview of them
will be used, generated by extracting the linkage information. This overview is
static, but gives significant insight into the structural conceptualisation and uses
a graphic representation that is energy-minimized by placing a “virtual” spring
between the photos so that, by iteration, an arrangement can be found that al-
lows minimal overlap between pictures and links. Even pictures excluded from
links with the other ones can be identified, showing what was included in the
collage as well as what was excluded from the original material.
Starting with the first collage, five segments can be identified, representing
different themes and paths connected to each other by one picture in the mid-
dle, a photomontage that looks like a postcard. The starting pictures of each of
these five walks through Darmstadt’s imaginary space are situated here.

Figure 3: Collage from empirical base; generated overview. © Sergej Stoetzer

6 Quoted from the interview with F.O. (with reference to the first collage; line 180).

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The labour and internment camp was located on the property of the Tele-
kom’s research centre directly after WWII (by Allied forces), and fragments
of it, like the old gatehouse with the main entrance, still exist, but usually do
not get noticed, even by people who have worked there for ten or more years,
like the student taking these pictures.
The second theme shows a view of a barracks square in the same area as
the internment camp, the Kavalleriesand-Kasernen. The original picture was
taken after the war and the participant tried to relocate the exact position from
which the old photo was taken, trying to show the relationship of tension be-
tween similarities and changes that occurred over the decades.
The first two motifs have a very close relationship to the biographical back-
ground of the student, who had worked at these locations for about a decade
before studying again. They represent the main idea of this collage, identify-
ing places from which old pictures were taken and trying to show what re-
mained, was altered, vanished, or which new elements appeared on the scene—
inspired by a publication doing just that and evoking a first interest in the rest
of the city, not just the place of work.
The third tour shows a formerly private Bank (to 1932; built 1873-1875),
the “Bank für Handel und Industrie.” It is located quite close to the inner city,
next to a former railway station that was relocated to its present location in
1912. The roof was damaged during WWII and two storeys were added af-
terwards, with very little architectural sensitivity—thus the student’s accusa-
tion: The building is protected as an architectural monument, but the recon-
struction of at least the façade could have been made better to be fair to the
building’s architectural and aesthetic roots.
The houses and courtyards at the Magdalenenstraße were chosen because
their old fabric is still intact. The old half-timbered houses created a specific
flair that could be (at least partly) preserved.
The Residential Castle, along with the university, constitutes the second
main biographical reference: the place of study. Similar to the motive before,
the castle’s courtyard is shown, too, as well as references to the underlying
theme of similarity/change and references to destruction caused by war (and
buildings in the post-war period): A single house was discovered close to the
university that still shows signs of another building that must have been next
to it, but was destroyed by the bombing of the city in September 1944.
Engaged with pictures of pre-war Darmstadt, the city’s history holds great
potential for explaining what was perceived as “architectural sins,” leading to
a more forgiving judgement of the city’s present appearance: The formerly
nice-looking city with a lot of Jugendstil buildings was nearly completely de-
stroyed on the 11th and 12th of September 1944, making rapid rebuilding neces-
sary after the war. The buildings of the post-war period were perceived as
sterile, but knowing the city’s history lead to the reinterpretation of Darm-

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stadt’s outer appearance, the victimising of the city by historical circumstances

beyond its influence in times of global conflict.

The second collage consists of three main topics: the private sector with the
shared flat, or student’s residence, leisure time activities and, the university
itself. The latter can be differentiated into five subtopics:

Figure 4: Second Collage. © Sergej Stoetzer

The collage begins with the exit from the private sector to one of the centres
of the collage, an aerial picture, allowing the observer to choose between the
two other main topics: the university or leisure.
The right part of the collage is about leisure activities, especially sports at
the university’s stadium. It can be reached from the other topics by aerial pic-
tures and photos of a schematic map showing the different buildings at the
campus. The importance of this place is due to the events taking place there,
like an ironically-named doddery-triathlon with ten people working together
to overcome the distance intended for one. In connection with this Olympic
spirit, the people who meet there and activities with friends are what are im-
portant and load this place with meaning by peers, action, and archaic sym-
bols. Another interesting aspect is the use of photos taken at different times of

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the same place, but with a different timescale: While the photo tour took place
in winter, some of the important “ensembles” for the participant’s production
of space (and ascription of a specific meaning to this place) were missing: the
peers and friends gathering around him there are substituted by using pictures
where they are present.
The last five identifiable themes are grouped around the third main topic,
“university.” Starting with the two most complex ones, working and partying
at the same location, there are very interesting descriptions of place-attributed
informal rules concerning both working rooms and events inside university
life: The students’ workrooms are highly hierarchically ordered, with the best
and most wanted places occupied by more advanced students, who spend most
of their time there. Time, as a resource, has to be invested on a long-term ba-
sis to improve one’s own situation.
Communicational functions inside that building are very important and
are provided by a coffee shop and places intended for assembly. Even the
material of the building, concrete, plays an important role, providing people
with durable walls to which one can nail posters or attach different kinds of
artwork, including graffiti or mosaics. In this respect, the material of the
building provides communicational functions, serving as a platform for pre-
senting ideas, exchanging them, and—technically speaking—working as a dis-
tribution machine with the corridors, elevators, and stairwells serving as con-
nectors between different places. A cluster of pictures takes these connections
as a topic. The canteen serves as a communication platform, too.
As a counterweight to the atmosphere of work and study, parties change
the atmosphere by decoration, including different DJs for separate rooms and
visual projections. This atmosphere provides a specific quality of freedom:
the freedom to be able to do things that are very close to being illegal (just
concerning safety issues) without anybody asking questions on the one hand,
and on the other knowing that without responsible behaviour this freedom
would vanish very soon. There is a very interesting contrast here between the
highly organised way workplaces have to be appropriated by students and the
freedom to organise events.
The subtopic connecting the two great poles of university and leisure in
the overview of the collage is artwork. It can be found on the campus and
even next to the student residence. The artwork shown in the collage ranges
from huge installations (the linear house) to very tiny graffiti or mosaic pat-
terns. For the student constructing this collage, art symbolically loads a place
with meaning by inviting the observer to discover meanings and links to other
places, people, or times—seeking traces other people have left behind. The
presence of others is characteristic of a place. To acquire a place then means
to institutionalise the perception of space at this specific place in a way that
the self is perceived (by the person as well as by others) to be one “legiti-

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mate” element of the constitution process. Identity, as belonging to certain

groups and places, is inscribed this way by institutionalising the process of the
production of space specific to places.
Darmstadt, as a city of science, is addressed in both collages by references
to the university as well as to a research centre outside the academic world. In
the interviews this concept of a city of science was questioned with answers
ranging from pride and identification (referring to national ranking concern-
ing research centres in and outside academia, where Darmstadt occupies the
third top place) to criticism, since this town has more to offer.
The analysis of the collages so far indicates three main visual representa-
tional techniques, addressing different levels of the process of identity-
formation in urban space:

The first technique, overview, is a result of an unfamiliar way of orientation in

the city’s space, like the way the collages would be without these vantage
points, allowing one to gain any sense of direction from the perspective of
street-level only. Brenda Yeoh (2001: 457) explains postcolonialism next to its
more known, tangible conception as a conceptual frame of reference “to de-
stabilize dominant discourses in the metropolitan west,” revealing assump-
tions about perception and orientation in the city (of the West).
Transferring this to purposes of orientation in Japanese urban space (leav-
ing the Eurocentric perspective), streets seldom have names and navigation in
the city is done by using some landmarks for a rough sense of direction, then
depending on traffic lights, pedestrian overpasses, hospitals, schools, and
other easily identifiable buildings. The intended way to build a digital city
with the approach used here visualises just that: the way a certain path through
the city would look like from the perspective of street-level. This would en-
hance the recognition of the observer actually visiting the places, preventing
him from getting lost, if not helping him grow accustomed, to this kind of
navigating. These collages can indeed be found almost solely with reference
to the Asian region: hotels showing their anticipated customers the way from
the train station, historic and religious monuments offering virtual explora-
tions supporting an easier finding of one’s way around actually visiting the
site, or people visualising their neighbourhood, house, or holiday trips.
Caricaturing the other perspective used in the collages, one could say that
people rooted in “Western culture” can imagine the city only after looking at
a map showing them the bird’s-eye view in a highly schematic and abstract
way.
Combining both views in the collages looks like a workaround at first,
considering the taken-for-granted assumptions about how urban space is ex-
plored. Having to work with a tool (the software was developed in Japan) that
is not intended for these “overview” purposes, using this technique anyway

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illustrates the deeply rooted cultural bias in exploring urban space—influencing

the constitution of urban identities by culturally different approaches of naviga-
tion and orientation in urban space (“needed” overview in Western cultures).7
The structural arrangement of the collage explains the highly selective
choice of what to show of the city’s diversity. The meanings of certain places
depend on the context of the actor’s intention exploring urban space, exposing
the influence of context of action for the choice of places to “interact” with.
Moderating the shift(s) in the temporal order of the collages by integrat-
ing pictorial representations from different times using variable time-scales,
the places’ dependency on time is stated concerning its atmosphere and the
possibilities of attaching meanings to it by integrating people and materiality.

Summary

Focussing these provisional findings, the following cornerstones of identity-

formation relating to places are available:
Concurrent to a three-pole triangular model of meaning of place suggested
by Per Gustafson (2001), the corner-stones of identity-formation are Self,
Others, and Environment, with the possibility of mapping meanings of place
between the three poles instead of assigning them to one as a sole category.
Other important aspects are the scales of place and time, the cultural context,
and the structure of attributed meanings.
Condensing these observations, Gustafson’s model of mapping meanings
of places can be regarded as what Martina Löw (2001) describes as produc-
tion of space, consisting of two processes of perception (synthesis) and action
(spacing). Synthesis includes the perception of self, environment, and others,
depending on the symbolic and material factors in situ, the habitus of the act-
ing person(s), the structural in- and exclusions. Synthesis and spacing are in-
terwoven and referenced against each other.
The production of space regarding place-based identity is therefore highly
dynamic, with each of the triad’s components underlying the axes of time, the
specificity of the places included (which changes due to the context the places
are visited), and the knowledge about the cultural connotation (Figure 5). This
leaves time as an ambiguous influencing factor. Mediating this triad on the
one hand, while being one of the resources used on the other hand, it at least
reassures what Norbert Elias (1994) said about space and time: being the two
main concepts of reference.

7 Thomas Sieverts (1997) is thinking about ways to integrate a schematic overview

for orientation purposes, while keeping the myth of the urban labyrinthine alive,
making it a task for urban and regional planning.

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 PICTURING URBAN IDENTITIES

Figure 5: Model of Löw’s relational space—attached with Gustaffsons tripolar model of

place-based identity. © Sergej Stoetzer

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SERGEJ STOETZER

Building a collage as a network of photos of specific places, the students par-

ticipating were able to build their subjective image of the city as a digital one
existing in medial space—like the official image production using ordinary
webpages. Showing fragments of the city’s space with specific importance,
these iconographics (semantic network of photographic essences of places) can
be analysed in order to examine the processes in which identity is bound to
places by repetition, memory, imagination, and social networks. Time and the
efforts for the production of space(s), as well as the place itself, artefacts, and
practises are the resources in this process.

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Communi st Herita ge Tour is m and it s Lo cal
( D is) C ont ent s at C h ec kpoint C harli e, B erlin

SYBILLE FRANK

This article focuses on a conflict that developed at Checkpoint Charlie in

2004 about the representation of the history of the famous site. It is argued
that, in the deregulated Berlin heritage industry, urban streets prove to be the
contested arenas in which questions of historic agency and display, as well as
those of self and other, are (re)negotiated between public, private, local, and
international actors, providing no ready-made scripts, but offering highly dif-
ferent negotiation powers for each of them.

With the Wall coming down in 1989, Checkpoint Charlie, divided Berlin’s
famous Allied border control point, became obsolete. Throughout the 1990s,
millions of people witnessed the breathtaking transformation of the former
checkpoint from a promising urban development site to a derelict symbol of
the reunified city’s failed investment politics, and, finally, to the former bor-
der crossing point being partially re-erected for tourist consumption by public
and competing private initiatives.
Notwithstanding this continuing tourist and media interest, the disputed
ways in which today’s Checkpoint Charlie came into being have hardly caught
the attention of the scientific community. Therefore, this article aims at identi-
fying some of the public and private players in the politics of history and
memory at Checkpoint Charlie, and at analyzing their diverging interests. To
this end, the analyses will focus on a conflict that developed there between the
Berlin government, the private Berlin Wall Museum, and a handful of drama
students in the summer of 2004, and which led to a most controversial debate
about how the history of the site should be represented. After investigating the

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economic, political, and cultural background of the controversy, the conflict

will be interpreted as illustrating the emergence of a Berlin heritage industry,
the peculiarities of which will, finally, be characterized with a view to the
complex ways in which urban conflicts are negotiated in times of globaliza-
tion. The term “heritage industry” is employed with reference to the works of
British and US researchers such as Robert Hewison (1987), David Lowenthal
(1985; 1996), or John Urry (1990), who defined the heritage industry as an
increasingly diversified and globalized tourism- and leisure-based industry
that has evolved against the background of post-Fordism, and in which a vari-
ety of public, and, in particular, a growing number of private actors compete
to create support for and revenue from anchoring their interpretation of his-
tory in public space (cf. Wright 1985; Fowler 1992; Rojek 1993; Samuel
1994, 1998; McCrone/Morris/Kiely 1995; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Arnold/
Davies/Ditchfield 1998; Graham/Ashworth/Tunbridge 2000).

The history of Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie was inaugurated in September 1961 by the British, French,

and US forces who had been stationed in Berlin since the end of World War
II. One of the few inner-city border crossing points that connected the eastern
and the western parts of divided Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie was reserved for
diplomats, members of the Allied forces, and foreign travellers. However,
only tourists were fully checked there, whereas diplomats and Allies were
allowed to pass the control point uncontrolled, following the freedom-of-
movement-agreement between the Soviets and the Western Allies (cf. Skior-
ski/Laabs 2003).
Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie developed into the
city’s most famous border crossing point, and it did so for five reasons: first,
it became famous as a dangerously “hot” site of the Cold War. In October
1961 it was the place where US and Soviet tanks faced each other, ready to
shoot, after Soviet soldiers had refused to let an American diplomat pass the
border uncontrolled. Soon after the conflict had been settled, Checkpoint
Charlie hit the headlines again: second, the most famous Wall victim, 18-
year-old Peter Fechter, bled to death close to Checkpoint Charlie after having
been shot by East German soldiers during his attempt to escape to the West.
Notwithstanding this, Checkpoint Charlie, third, also became renowned for
more than 1200 successful flights to the West, since many GDR citizens made
use of its special status by dressing up as Soviet majors or American soldiers,
thus crossing the border unmolested. Fourth, in 1963 the West Berlin Wall
Museum opened at Checkpoint Charlie to document both the history of the
Wall and the flight stories. Founded by refugee smuggler Rainer Hildebrandt,

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 COMMUNIST HERITAGE TOURISM

it became not only one of Berlin’s best-visited museums, but also a centre of
peaceful resistance against the Wall. Fifth, Checkpoint Charlie was heavily
frequented, as it was the eye of the needle for foreign travellers wishing to
enter East Berlin. Therefore, the border crossing point symbolized both hope-
less division and a hopeful passage.
When the Wall came down in 1989, Checkpoint Charlie lost its function
overnight. Following the ceremonious dismantling of the border crossing
point in June 1990, the place, suddenly located in the “new centre” of the
soon-to-be German capital, became attractive for investment. It was as early
as February 1992 that the Berlin Senate sold the former borderland at Check-
point Charlie to a private enterprise: the Central European Development Cor-
poration (CEDC) planned to build an American Business Center on the prem-
ises that were soon meant to become the headquarters of some big service
companies.
For the Berlin Senate, the sale of the land was very attractive, as it prom-
ised both a prestigious urban development project and the creation of jobs in
times of public money shortage. Following reunification, Berlin had lost the
generous financial feeds that both West Berlin, the “island city” of the Federal
Republic of Germany, and East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic
Republic, had enjoyed. To provide the city, which was characterized by a
backward industrial sector and high unemployment rates, with a new perspec-
tive, the Berlin Senate decided to attract foreign capital that should profit
from a deregulated bureaucracy (cf. Lenhart 2001). Being Berlin’s first major
urban development project, the contract of purchase with the CEDC was
signed rapidly, making no conditions as to the representation of the site of the
famous former Allied checkpoint. Because of the ongoing dead calm in the
Berlin real estate market, however, the project soon came to a halt. By the
time the main investor left the CEDC in 1997, only three of the planned five
blocks had been built, turning the former model project into an infamous ur-
ban planning torso.
As a consequence, the void CEDC grounds East of the former border were
gradually taken over by hawkers who sold GDR-souvenirs to tourists. On
Checkpoint Charlie’s Western side, the Berlin Senate marked the former line
of the Berlin Wall with cobblestones in 1997, responding to the rising tourist
demand for signs of the vanished border. A year later, the previous border
crossing point was further furnished with a large lighted box that displayed
two photos of a Russian and an American soldier. Moreover, in 2001, Rainer
Hildebrandt, still the director of the Berlin Wall Museum, donated to the for-
mer Checkpoint Charlie an exact replica of the dismantled Allied border con-
trol cabin. Garnished with fake flags and sand sacks, and combined with a
copy of the famous warning sign “Your are leaving the American Sector…,”
the replica succeeded in re-establishing much of the former view of the once-

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SYBILLE FRANK

famous border crossing point (Figure 1). It was this replica which set the
scene for a “burlesque” (Berliner Provinzposse 2004) that developed at Check-
point Charlie in the summer of 2004.

Figure 1: Checkpoint Charlie with picture of border official (Berlin Senate), border sign
and cabin replicas (Wall Museum), seen from the east (Photo: © Sybille Frank, 2004)

The “burlesque” of summer 2004

On the 3rd of June, 2004, the German press agency broadcast the following
news: “In protest against the appearance of fake GDR policemen in front of
the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie as a tourist attraction, the
world-famous former border crossing point has been wrapped up. ‘We can no
longer tolerate that this symbol of division is being abused,’ the initiator Al-
exandra Hildebrandt, member of the Wall Museum, said” (quoted according
to Protest gegen falsche DDR-Polizisten 2004).
In interviews with the rushed-to-the-scene reporters, the fake GDR po-
licemen who had provoked the spectacular veiling turned out to be a group of
drama students. For a few euros, the students, who were dressed in uniforms
of the former GDR People’s Police, posed with tourists in front of the control
cabin replica for photo-shoots, or pressed original GDR border stamps in
passports. After some days of verbal clashes between the fake border officials
and Alexandra Hildebrandt, who had become director of the Wall Museum

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after the death of her husband Rainer Hildebrandt, Mrs. Hildebrandt had or-
dered a building firm to veil the control building with a tarpaulin.
In Alexandra Hildebrandt’s opinion, the students’ activities insulted the
victims of German separation. She could not bear to witness how “a memorial
place is being transformed into a Disneyland” (Hildebrandt, quoted according
to Müller 2004), and she declared that she would “unveil the cabin only after
the degrading spectacle has terminated, or after the Berlin government has
called a halt to that offence against history” (press release of the Wall Mu-
seum, June 3, 2004).
Within the next few hours a rapid development of conflict lines could be
observed: The director of the memorial for the victims of the GDR state secu-
rity service, Hubertus Knabe, declared that he could “not understand the care-
less way in which the students treat the symbols of political persecution in the
former GDR” (quoted according to Pletl 2004a). At the same time, the Asso-
ciation of Former Political Prisoners/Union of the Victims of Stalinism insisted
on the immediate end to the activities—a demand that was supported by more
and more victims’ associations.
The drama students, however, felt irritated by the sudden uproar. Their
speaker, Tom Luszeit, argued: “In Rome, there are gladiators in front of the
Colosseum as well” (quoted according to Nickel 2004), and he informed the
bewildered journalists that the students had posed in front of the cabin for
months. After the former East Berlin district Mitte had refused to approve
their action, they had asked the former West-Berlin district Kreuzberg for per-
mission, which was granted in October 2003. Even though this made the stu-
dents in their Eastern costumes stand on the historically “wrong” side of the
border, i.e. the former Western side, and although the former Eastern border
officials had not worn the uniforms of the GDR People’s Police, but those of
the GDR People’s Army, the tourists’ reactions had been enthusiastic. The
students wanted to give the Berlin visitors “a live impression of what had
happened at the place in former times.” “I want to educate, not to insult the
victims,” Luszeit summarized the students’ intents (quoted according to Müller
2004, Pletl 2004b).
With a view to the tense situation, a comment from the district Kreuzberg,
which had approved the students’ activities, was eagerly awaited. The town
councillor in charge, Franz Schulz (Green Party), declared that it was neither
forbidden to let oneself be photographed in the streets for money nor to wear
a GDR People’s Police uniform in public. When enquired about the control
building, Schulz dissociated himself from the Wall Museum, denouncing its
cabin replica as “Disneylike”: “Quite obviously, neither does this cheap copy for
tourists correspond to the dignity of the place” (quoted according to Schmidl
2004).

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The next day, the situation suddenly changed: The students apologized to
the victims’ associations, replaced their GDR People’s Police uniforms with
those of the Western Allies and asked Alexandra Hildebrandt to uncover the
control building. However, Hildebrandt insisted that she would only let peo-
ple gaze at the cabin again if all commercial activities at Checkpoint Charlie
were officially banned. As a surprise, the victims’ associations now declared
their solidarity with the students. For example, Herbert Pfaff, a representative
of the memorial site for the victims of the GDR state security service, blus-
tered: “Checkpoint Charlie is not the property of Mrs. Hildebrandt” (quoted
according to Puppe 2004), and he demanded that the tarpaulin be taken away
so that the victims of German separation could once again be commemorated
at the historic site.
Finally, after some more days of fierce struggle, Berlin’s Senator for city
planning, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer (Social Democrats), intervened by issuing a
three-point-press release. In the document, Junge-Reyer clarified that Check-
point Charlie was a place “where the division of the city is commemorated,
and not a place for masquerade” (Checkpoint Charlie ist kein Ort für Mum-
menschanz 2004). As the first of the recommended measures, the Senator
called upon Alexandra Hildebrandt to remove the veiling of the cabin imme-
diately, since it violated the special public space use permit agreed upon with
the district. Second, a higher density of traffic police controls at Checkpoint
Charlie was announced, so that free traffic flow would be guaranteed. As a
third instruction, a zebra crossing was to be installed next to the traffic island,
in which the control building was located, in order to raise pedestrian traffic
safety.
These three “traffic” instructions in fact meant a defeat for both of the
contending parties: While Alexandra Hildebrandt was obligated to unveil the
building, the announced traffic police controls and the zebra crossing equalled
a trading prohibition for the students: they were no longer allowed to pose on
the street for their photo-shoots, and the traffic island would be restricted soon
as well, as trading on zebra crossings was generally prohibited. Consequently,
only the narrow sidewalks at Checkpoint Charlie could be legally used by the
students in the future.
Following a police raid against the students, Alexandra Hildebrandt fi-
nally unwrapped the control cabin. But the students returned, temporarily tak-
ing up position on the traffic island with the control building (Figure 2).
Ironically enough, this decision now made the tourists fall victim to the inten-
sified police guard: as it was now they who had to step on the street to take
pictures of the students from a good perspective, they had to be escorted back
to the sidewalks by the policemen. And, even more ironically, in doing so, it
was now the “real” policemen who turned into desired photo objects. Quite

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obviously, the heightened police presence at the former border crossing point
augmented the authenticity of the historic place, known to be a checkpoint.
While analyzing some of the economic, political, and cultural back-
grounds of the conflict in the following, the focus will lie on Alexandra Hil-
debrandt’s activities, as it was she who staged the described fight as a media
event—a fight about the question of what today’s Checkpoint Charlie should
stand for, and who should have a say in it.

Figure 2: Drama students dressed in uniforms of the Western Allies

(Photo: © Sybille Frank, 2004)

The economic perspective

From the economic perspective, the conflict can be interpreted as Alexandra

Hildebrandt’s fight to monopolize the profits that come with the internation-
ally renowned place by transforming it into a showcase for her Wall Museum.
To achieve this, the museum director engaged in a strategy that can be called
profit generation by spacing. Spacing was important as it could provide for
hereness: as the American researcher Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted,
the successful production of a heritage destination necessitates the creation of
hereness, which can be achieved either by actualities, or, in the absence of
actualities, by virtualities (1998: 167). In the case of dismantled Checkpoint
Charlie, hereness obviously had to be produced by virtualities, which were
provided by the museum’s replicas of the control cabin and the famous border

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SYBILLE FRANK

sign. As these copies put the historic place back on the Berlin map, it was
also, subsequently, put back on tourist bus itineraries.
Moreover, once the tourists had reached Checkpoint Charlie, spacing
could channel them into the museum by using the replicas as signposts. For
example, a board under the famous border sign informs the visitors: “This
sign is a copy. The original still exists and can be seen in the Haus am Check-
point Charlie”—which is the German name of the Wall museum. Finally,
spacing could help to maximize profits through the displacement of competi-
tors. Accordingly, Alexandra Hildebrandt used the wrapped-up control cabin
as a pledge against the students who had degraded the building to a photo
background and obstructed its advertising function for the museum. But, as
described, the veiling of the building was also intended to focus public atten-
tion on the “commercialization” of the historic site, and to push for a grand
political solution. In order to strengthen the museum’s position in this proc-
ess, however, the public had to take the side of the museum and its interpreta-
tion of history.

The political perspective

Hence, the political perspective shows the burlesque as a struggle about what
should be commemorated at the historic site. In this context, Alexandra Hil-
debrandt was aiming at establishing Checkpoint Charlie as a victims’ place in
public memory, and at anchoring the museum as the victims’ advocate in pub-
lic discourse.
To construct Checkpoint Charlie as a victims’ place, Hildebrandt set out
to criticize the other commercial suppliers at Checkpoint Charlie for capitaliz-
ing on the victims’ pains. This implied a scandalization of the students’ activi-
ties as “a disgrace of the Berlin Wall victims” and “an offence against his-
tory” (press release of the Wall Museum, June 3, 2004)—a point of view that
was soon supported by the victims’ associations. As a consequence, the fact
that Checkpoint Charlie had been world-famous for numerous successful es-
capes to the West receded into the background. At the same time, Hilde-
brandt’s attempt to establish the museum as the victims’ advocate in the pub-
lic discourse could distract from the fact that, since the fall of the Wall, the
former non-profit Wall Museum had also changed into a profit-oriented pri-
vate enterprise that capitalized on the victims’ stories. Throughout the 1990s,
the museum’s exhibition concept had been changed according to an event-
and adventure-based dramaturgy, new rooms had been rented and a museum
shop had been opened so that, after the museum officially relinquished all
subsidies in 2002, it managed to establish a reputation as Europe’s most suc-
cessful commercial museum (cf. Engel/Konnerth 1998; Kunzemann 2002).

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Nonetheless, to perpetuate the museum’s acclaimed traditional image as

an unselfish, courageous advocate of the oppressed, however, today’s institu-
tion is promoted by Alexandra Hildebrandt as the lifework of museum foun-
der Rainer Hildebrandt, the political activist and refugee smuggler. This mes-
sage is again communicated by the disputed control cabin, which was changed
into a memorial for Mr. Hildebrandt shortly after his death in early 2004: the
windows of the cabin have been covered with copies of the museum’s press
release that informs about the local hero’s life and death. Behind the win-
dows, a huge oil-painting portrays Rainer Hildebrandt. Next to the building,
flowers have been piled up to commemorate the deceased museum director.
Therefore, the students’ activities did not just disgrace the victims of the
Wall. According to Alexandra Hildebrandt, they also defiled the remem-
brance of her husband (cf. Müller 2004). Publicly staged like this, the refer-
ence to refugee smuggler Rainer Hildebrandt did not only bear the potential of
identifying today’s private museum with the former political non-profit orga-
nization, but also of making the discourse on Checkpoint Charlie as a victims’
place more plausible.

The cultural perspective

Last but not least, the cultural perspective brings cultural value systems and
practices into focus and shows today’s Checkpoint Charlie as a site where
local traditions of historic agency and display clash with traditions brought
along with tourists from all over the world.
This point can be illustrated by the accusation of Disneyfication that ac-
companied the whole debate as a leitmotif. First launched by Alexandra Hil-
debrandt against the students’ activities, it was later turned against the Wall
Museum’s cabin replica by town councillor Franz Schulz, and, finally, bun-
dled in the press against all commercial suppliers at Checkpoint Charlie, who
were criticized for reshaping the historic site as a spectacular place of event
and sentiment, thereby violating the authenticity, respectability, and truthful-
ness of the historic site. While serving as a cultural demarcation line against
the “fake” and “commercialization,” the Disneyfication reproach thus implic-
itly suggested that there was something “original” and “inalienable” to be pro-
tected at dismantled Checkpoint Charlie—which turned out to be the locality
itself.
The logic behind this is uncovered by Frank Schulz’s earlier critique of
the cabin replica: In stating that “Quite obviously, neither does this cheap
copy for tourists correspond to the dignity of the place” (quoted according to
Schmidl 2004), Schulz extended his critique of the cabin to its consumers, the
tourists. Apparently, the tourists did not seem to care whether or not the ob-

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jects presented to them at Checkpoint Charlie were originals or copies. To

them, it was far more important that they could experience the famous Cold
War site—which also embraced, as described, the overall presence of police-
men. Therefore, the fact that Checkpoint Charlie, which had been proudly
dismantled in 1990, was partly reconstructed by a set of private actors for
tourist consumption a decade later, was scandalized as an undesirable change
of the locality under the grasp of global tourism. Accordingly, it was provoca-
tive that the students, in defending their costumed activities, did not refer to
the local tradition of flight masquerades through Checkpoint Charlie during
Cold War times, but, as quoted above, to the fake Gladiators in front of the Co-
losseum in Rome.
In sum, the import of both the American Disney and the American Living
History model with its historic re-enactments to Berlin, and its success with
foreign tourists, confronted the city with a new—globally induced—problem
that still had to be negotiated locally: the question how to integrate differing
cultural values and practices at a place that had only recently been constructed
as a “sacred” victims’ site.

Co n c l u s i o n

Putting together the three perspectives, the Checkpoint Charlie case illustrates
the conflict-laden formation phase of a post-Wall Berlin heritage industry that
can be characterized by the following three points:
First, the described conflict shows the formation of a Berlin heritage in-
dustry beyond political regulations. While most of the Anglo-American heri-
tage research identifies national, regional, or communal governments as well-
organized actors who deliberately initiate specific public-private-partnerships
in the field of heritage politics to exploit it, for example, as a means of local
economic regeneration or to exert power over social groups (c.f. Wright 1985;
Lowenthal 1985; 1996; Hewison 1987), the Checkpoint Charlie case intro-
duces a Berlin government that is highly disorganized. First, the Berlin Senate
sold the premises at Checkpoint Charlie to an international investor without
giving any instructions as to how the famous historic place should be repre-
sented. Second, following the investor’s breakdown, a potpourri of private
actors was invited by the two involved districts to capitalize on the history of
the former control point—once more without the issuing of any regulations as
to what should be presented at Checkpoint Charlie, or how that should be
done. The described conflict forced the lack of concepts and ready measures
of Berlin’s governing bodies to address the city’s Cold War history and to
regulate those private actors on the public agenda for the first time, leading to
it being referred to as a “burlesque.”

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 COMMUNIST HERITAGE TOURISM

The second peculiarity of the Berlin heritage industry is its spontaneous

formation beyond sites. While the vast majority of heritage research describes
the ongoing global heritage boom as a purposeful restaging of historic relics
as sites (c.f. Urry 1990; Rojek 1993), Checkpoint Charlie is neither a place
where historic remnants can be found nor a space that has been nominated for
commemoration. Having been spontaneously resurrected by a set of actors
who tried to meet a continuing tourist demand, today’s Checkpoint Charlie
therefore catapults the supply- and site-oriented heritage discussion to a de-
mand-oriented level on which urban streets come into focus. In this constella-
tion the addressees change: while designated sites primarily appeal to tourist
needs, the revivification of Checkpoint Charlie at the same time needs to be
conveyed, as a publicly accessible inner-city space, to locals, too. It is this
need to create local support for the restaging of the famous place that explains
Alexandra Hildebrandt’s strategy to anchor Checkpoint Charlie as a “dark”
victims’ spot in the local perception, and to use the Berliners’ subsequent
prise de conscience for the former border control point to engage them in a
Disneyfication discourse which aimed to degrade and displace the museum’s
commercial competitors. Accordingly, Checkpoint Charlie became connected
with local discourses that separated “admissible” from “degrading” cultural
practices, turning the derelict place into a “sacred site,” and the replica of the
Allied control cabin that had itself been accused for being Disneylike shortly
before, into a symbol of local identity and pride eagerly defended by the vic-
tims’ associations.
As a third point, the Checkpoint Charlie example contradicts heritage
theories that lament the power of the global over the local (c.f. Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett 1998). On the contrary, the urban conflict that was negotiated here
shows the (re)construction of the locality as a reciprocal negotiation process
into which both global and local images of the place have entered.
On the global-local level, the tourist demand and presence has shaped
both Checkpoint Charlie’s material face and local commemorative traditions.
While Berlin’s hitherto existing places dedicated to the Cold War victims
were located at original sites, away from tourist routes, the identification of
the victims’ associations with today’s resurrected Checkpoint Charlie shows a
twofold adoption of practices that had been dismissed as “Disneylike” before
the conflict: first, the victims’ identification with a replica, i.e. the control cabin
replica, and, second, the desire to anchor the remembrance of the Wall vic-
tims in a centre of international attention. These processes indicate the vic-
tims’ turning away from the traditional European idea of the inalienability of
originals for commemoration, both with a view to original historic objects and
to original historic places.
On the local-global level, the rise and maintenance of the victims’ per-
spective has functioned as a local corrective against the tourists, for whom the

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thrilling Cold War history of Checkpoint Charlie—with the tanks that faced
each other—makes up the sensation of the place. This perspective even led to
the widely-reported opening of a private Wall victims’ memorial on the East-
ern side of Checkpoint Charlie in October 2004, donated by the Wall Mu-
seum, which was torn down by the credit company administering the former
CEDC grounds in July 2005, despite substantial local and international pro-
test. By this, the burlesque of summer 2004 has, in the long run, also led to
the public insight that reunified Berlin’s governing bodies and local groups
urgently need to find their position as to the city’s globally popular, but lo-
cally still very unpopular, Cold War history if they want this history to be told
by themselves and not by others.

Re f e r e n c e s

Arnold, John/Davies, Kate/Ditchfield, Simon (eds.) (1998) History & Heri-

tage. Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture, Shaftesbury, Dorset:
Donhead.
Berliner Provinzposse. Vopos am Checkpoint Charlie (2004) [Link]
[Link], 3 June.
Checkpoint Charlie ist kein Ort für Mummenschanz (2004) Senatsverwaltung
für Stadtentwicklung, press release, 11 June.
Engel, M./Konnerth, D. (1998) “‘Wir arbeiten in Angst und Schrecken’”. Ber-
liner Zeitung, 21 November.
Fowler, Peter (1992) The Past in Contemporary Society. Then, Now, London:
Routledge.
Graham, Brian/Ashworth, G.J./Tunbridge, T.E. (2000) A Geography of Heri-
tage. Power, Culture and Economy, London: Arnold.
Hewison, Robert (1987) The Heritage Industry. Britain in a Climate of De-
cline, London: Methuen.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination Culture. Tourism, Muse-
ums, and Heritage, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kunzemann, Thilo (2002) “Kontrollen am Checkpoint”. Die tageszeitung, 14
February.
Lenhart, Karin (2001) Berliner Metropoly. Stadtentwicklungspolitik im Ber-
liner Bezirk Mitte nach der Wende, Opladen: Leske + Budrich.
Lowenthal, David (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lowenthal, David (1996) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History,
New York: Free Press.
McCrone, David/Morris, Angela/Kiely, Richard (1995) Scotland – the Brand.
The Making of Scottish Heritage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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 COMMUNIST HERITAGE TOURISM

Müller, Felix (2004) “Ein Gespenst geht um am Checkpoint Charlie”. Ber-

liner Morgenpost, 3 June.
Nickel, Veronika (2004) “Checkpoint Charlie. Wieder eine Baracke verhüllt”.
Die tageszeitung, 4 June.
Pletl, Steffen (2004a) “Baracke aus Protest verhüllt”. Die Welt, 4 June.
Pletl, Steffen (2004b) “Checkpoint-Baracke: ‘Vopos’ verhüllen sich”. Ber-
liner Morgenpost, 4 June.
Protest gegen falsche DDR-Polizisten (2004) [Link]
news/[Link]?storyid=7919, 3 June.
Puppe, Andrea (2004) “‘Alliierte’ posieren im US-Jeep”. Berliner Morgen-
post, 7 June.
Rojek, Chris (1993) Ways of Escape. Modern Transformations in Leisure and
Travel, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture, London: Verso.
Samuel, Raphael (1998) Theatres of Memory. Vol. 2: Island Stories. Unravel-
ing Britain, London: Verso.
Schmidl, Karin (2004) “Unruhe am Checkpoint Charlie”. Berliner Zeitung, 5
June.
Sikorski, Werner/Laabs, Werner (2003) Checkpoint Charlie und die Mauer.
Ein geteiltes Volk wehrt sich, Berlin: Ullstein.
Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary
Societies, London: Sage.
Wright, Patrick (1985) On Living in an Old Country. The National Past in
Contemporary Britain, London: Verso.

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Earthqua k e Re co ver y and Hi st oric Bu ildings:
Inve st igat ing t h e C onf lict s

FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

As a pilot study, this paper investigates how conflicts developed during the
earthquake recovery of a historic building in San Francisco. The study shows
that such a building can be a contested space in earthquake recovery, as dif-
ferent groups push for different values. The subsequent conflict develops in
phases, with roots based in the people and the context of the recovery more
than in the building itself. More research is needed to investigate the process
of recovery as it relates to historic buildings.

Background

Recovery after an earthquake is challenging for any community as it endeav-

ors to repair the damages. It is a period that witnesses struggles between dif-
ferent groups with different priorities. As such, the recovery period is often
tinged with conflicts (Berke/Beatley 1997: 27–31; Geipel 1982: 16, 171; 1991:
91; Lindell/ Prater 2003: 11–12).
Disasters have physical, social, psychological, sociodemographic, socioeco-
nomic, and political impacts, in addition to many indirect impacts (cf. Lindell/
Prater 2003). As a community focuses on returning to routine life activities,
historic buildings may not be valued and they may be unnecessarily demol-
ished, leading to the irreversible loss of many important cultural properties
(Craigo 1998: 96; Feilden 1987: 37; Kariotis 1998: 59).
Literature divides the post-disaster period into four main stages: 1) Emer-
gency (response) period; 2) Restoration (short-term recovery) period; 3) Re-
construction I (long-term recovery) period; and 4) Reconstruction II (com-

209
FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

memorative period) (Berke/Beatley 1997: 36; Haas et al. 1977: 279–281). This
paper measures recovery as the time needed to repair a building after an earth-
quake.
Many factors affect the decisions made during the recovery period—the
amount of damage, costs and benefits, resources available, time pressures,
preservation awareness in the community, and political attitudes, which can
have an important influence—especially after wars (Geva/Al-Nammari 2002;
Haas et. al. 1978: 263–264). Such decisions are an outcome of social proc-
esses that have not yet been fully investigated. The dynamics of such proc-
esses are important, as they affect the decisions as well as the time and cost
involved in the recovery.
In this paper, conflict follows the definition provided by Anstey (1999: 6)
as a struggle over resources aimed at controlling the result. It is part of any
process of decision making that affects a community or a resource, and is
based on the beliefs of groups, which can be true or false (Anstey 1999: 5–13;
Warner 2001: 14–16). Therefore, since resources are limited in post-disaster
situations, different groups will have different stands on the best use of such
resources, thus creating conflict (Bolin/Stanford 1990: 107; Geipel 1982: 171;
Phillips/Ephraim 1992: 6–9).
Preservation1 is defined by the International Committee of Monuments
and Sites (Australia ICOMOS 1999: article 1.4) as a process of looking after a
place to retain its cultural significance. Preservation is thus an act of man-
agement, and international charters have stressed that cultural resources
should be preserved so that their tangible and intangible values are maintained
and passed on to future generations (cf. ICOMOS 1982; 1987; 1999).
Historic preservation after disasters has seldom been investigated. Several
studies have shown that historic buildings face special challenges (cf. Eadie
1991; Jones 1986; Look/Spennemann 2000, 2001; Merritt 1990; Nelson 1991;
Spennemann/Look 1998). The old construction methods, the significance of
the buildings’ fabric, and the meaning they hold put them in a separate cate-
gory from nonhistoric buildings, which is a situation that sometimes leads to
conflicts. Noted issues are damage assessments, retrofit, and maintaining the
integrity of the historic fabric.2 Also, the specific requirements of mitigation
and rehabilitation pose challenges that encourage owners to demolish and
build anew (Craigo 1998: 18; Feilden 1987: 43–53; Kariotis 1998: 55–59; Look
1997: 1–7; Spangle Associates 1999: 22–26). While several studies have indi-
cated that historic buildings face conflicts in recovery, more studies are needed
to investigate how such conflicts happen. Such investigations are important,

1 ICOMOS uses the term “Conservation,” not “Preservation,” but to maintain con-
sistency the term Preservation will be used, as it is the term used in the US.
2 Integrity of fabric is a term used by preservationists to identify a state in which
the original historic building materials and systems remain intact.

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 EARTHQUAKE RECOVERY AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS

as conflicts cause delays and time is an important factor in successful disaster

recovery (Haas et al. 1977: 21; Wu/Lindell 2004: 76–77).
Demolitions seem to be the most cited source of conflict for historic build-
ings. After an earthquake, there is intense pressure on public officials for rapid
demolitions because damaged buildings seem to pose a safety threat (Schwab
et al. 1998: 295). In addition, damage to some buildings leads to the assump-
tion that the historic fabric is no longer of historic value, which also results in
demolitions (Spennemann/Look 1998: 3). Demolitions are also sometimes
considered by the owners of historic structures due to the regulations and
building codes that encourage such actions indirectly and make them more
economically rewarding (Spangle Associates 1999: 23–27).
Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the conflicts that
face historic buildings after earthquakes. It is a pilot study to identify how
conflicts develop. It is not the purpose of this paper, however, to investigate
all challenges facing historic buildings in recovery. Instead, the study focuses
on the roots of the conflict and how these conflicts ensue. This is accom-
plished by studying the recovery process of a publicly-owned building in San
Francisco that was, at one point, scheduled for demolition.

Methods

As a pilot study that is part of a larger investigation of the recovery of historic

buildings after earthquakes, this investigation used a case-study approach and
focused on a building in San Francisco after the 1989 Loma Prieta earth-
quake. San Francisco was chosen because it has been through several earth-
quakes in its history. As a result, its codes and city processes have familiarity
with post-earthquake recovery processes. Also, its most recent earthquake
occurred far enough in the past to enable researchers to reflect on the effects
of the long-term recovery and its issues. The chosen building, the Williams
Building, faced more recovery delays than similar buildings in San Francisco.
It took more than eight years to attain funding, while 75 percent of publicly-
owned historic buildings needed four to five years after that earthquake to get
funding (Al-Nammari 2005).
Two sources of data were used: 1) documents related to the recovery of
the Williams Building; and 2) interviews with ten professionals involved in
the recovery of that building and other historic buildings. Each source com-
plemented the information attained from the other and helped develop a better
understanding of the case and its context. The documents were obtained from
the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) in California.3 Not all of the

3 Also known as the Office of Historic Preservation.

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FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

documents were found, but the documents available provided an outline of

what occurred until most of the funding issues were resolved. The analysis
focused on correspondences and agreements, as they show the concerns of the
different parties and related decisions. The data were complemented by in-
formation attained through semi-structured interviews administered on the
phone with professionals who were either involved in this project or with
other publicly-owned historic buildings. The objective of the interviews was
to complement the information attained from the documents and to relate the
recovery of that building to recovery of historic buildings in general. The qu-
estions covered the main issues that were faced during the recovery. Probes
were used to identify the sources of the conflicts.
Two main kinds of matrixes were used to analyze the data. The first ma-
trix was time ordered, and it reflected the developments taking place across
time, with subheadings identifying the different variables that were grouped
as the documents were studied. The interviews were analyzed using a matrix
where sources of conflict were grouped based on an interpretive analysis of
the answers (Miles and Huberman 1994: 127–129).

Ca s e s t u d y : T h e W i l l i a m s B u i l d i n g

Built in 1907, the Williams Building is an eight-story building with a 50,000

square-foot area, eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic
Buildings. It was constructed of a steel frame with brick aggregate concrete
floor slabs and masonry cladding, with distinctive brickwork on the east and
south facades. The building occupies an important corner at the intersection of
two streets in downtown San Francisco. The San Francisco Redevelopment
Agency, a public agency, owns the building, which lies in an area that was
subject to a redevelopment project.
The earthquake of 1989 created several cracks in the walls, beams, and
columns, leading to a red-tag status for the building. As a public agency, the
owner applied for recovery funding from the Federal Emergency Manage-
ment Agency (FEMA). Since the building is historic, it was subject to a Sec-
tion 1064 review.
According to the available documents, the project started with FEMA in
October 1989, and ended in April 2001. The total funding given to the build-

4 Section 106 is part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which re-
quires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic
properties. It provides the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an inde-
pendent federal agency in collaboration with State Historic Preservation Officer
(SHPO), a chance to comment on the project in an attempt to reduce negative ef-
fects on historic properties. It also requires public participation in the review.

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 EARTHQUAKE RECOVERY AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS

ing was $6,876,692. Since few historic buildings took that long to attain fund-
ing from FEMA, investigating this building is useful in understanding the
possible sources of complications.
This paper investigates the process of recovery as it relates to decisions
about how to repair the building, but not the construction process itself. As
such, the study ends by 2001, which represents the end of the legal relation-
ship with the funding agency (FEMA) and the major decision-making phases.
Construction work was still taking place on the site when it was visited in
April 2005.

The Williams Building’s project went through the following stages:

1. 1989-1993: Project initiation. This stage was the most critical, as deci-
sions had to be made on what to do with the building; these decisions led
to the conflict. Once the owner applied for funding from FEMA, the Sec-
tion 106 process was triggered and several issues were raised before the
funding could be provided:
• To demolish or to repair. The owner felt that demolition was the best
solution. The building was red-tagged, but that does not necessarily
mean that it was beyond repair. Demolition could have been funded
by FEMA, had it not been a historic building. Section 106 review
brought the decision-making process to the SHPO, who did not concur
with the demolition. It also allowed for interested stakeholders to be
involved, thus including active historic preservation groups in the de-
cision-making process. Since the building could be repaired, demoli-
tion was not an option. This introduced several questions, as repairs
depended on the building’s future use, which was not clear at the time.
• The level of strengthening needed. The owner believed that if the
building was not to be demolished, then it should have an acceptable
level of seismic safety for its inhabitants. The owner’s consultant had
a specific level of safety in mind, but the SHPO’s consultant believed
that the building did not need all the strengthening proposed by the
owner. This divergence in the consultants’ opinions took years to re-
solve as the strength of the structure and its historic construction were
questioned. Professionals on either side had different assessments of
the seismic strength of the building, creating further delays.
This issue launched other questions. The owner and the consultant
proposed that the strengthening they suggested was required by the
San Francisco Code (Section 104 (f)), which was debated until it was
shown not to be the case.
• How to strengthen the building was also an issue. The owner’s con-
sultant proposed a certain scheme that used shear walls and temporary
bracing. This proposal worried the SHPO, as it had an effect on the
historical character of the building. The problem was that some walls

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FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

in the building were damaged and needed urgent treatment to maintain

public safety. To complicate matters further, the owner was trying to
find a developer for the building and did not want to subject it to any
permanent repair work. They felt that the developer, the party who
would be using the building, would repair the building according to its
intended use. Thus the owner had to take actions to prevent immediate
public hazard, and at the same time make such actions temporary.
The owner believed that demolition might be a better investment since
the building was half-empty at the time of the earthquake. The desir-
ability of the location increased the potential for such an investment.
• The high cost of the requested temporary strengthening was an issue.
FEMA tried to minimize the cost as it attempted to maximize effi-
ciency of disaster funding, so suggesting a two-million-dollar scheme
for temporary bracing was problematic. FEMA proposed spending
$27,000 to repair the cracks. The owner insisted that the building was
not safe and that retrofit was needed.
This phase involved much deliberation among the parties that were di-
rectly involved: the owner, FEMA, and SHPO. The public was invited
for input and participation, as required by Section 106. Historic pres-
ervationists were involved in the meetings and the correspondence,
and they pushed for solutions that could save the building with mini-
mal intervention into its historic fabric. Yet as preservationists were
pushing for saving the building, FEMA was concerned about saving
cost, and the owner wanted an easier solution.
• Maintaining the integrity of the historic fabric, in addition to the his-
toric character, are two issues that emerged as discussions continued.
Retrofit work can affect the integrity of the architectural systems of
the building (cf. Look 1997), and the bracing had an impact on its his-
toric character. Since no one knew exactly how long it would be be-
fore a developer was found, such bracing could stay longer than an-
ticipated. Such issues were of importance for the SHPO and historic
preservationists, but the owner and the consultants believed that their
suggested scheme would not have any adverse effect. This was a moot
point in discussions, as each side insisted on its perspective.
In 1993, four years after the earthquake, the owner received warning
from the Department of Public Works pointing out that the building
was hazardous to public safety in its current condition. The owner de-
cided to demolish the building in spite of the ongoing consultation
with the SHPO, leading to the withdrawal of the SHPO from Section
106 review as a reaction to this decision. Still, FEMA would not give
the owner the funds needed for the demolition, as the required Section
106 review was not yet completed.

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 EARTHQUAKE RECOVERY AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS

2. 1993-1996: Primary decisions. After the SHPO withdrew from the consul-
tations, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) became
involved. The involvement of the ACHP resulted in a Programmatic
Agreement between them, FEMA, and the owner that required the latter
not to demolish the building unless it was shown that repairing it was
unfeasible. It was agreed that the owner would brace it temporarily. The
estimated total cost for the bracing, the retrofit, and repairs was more than
six million dollars. Two million dollars of the estimated cost were for the
temporary bracing, and the rest was redirected to other projects by the own-
er.5 This, however, did not provide a solution for the building, which was
awaiting a developer to do the final repair work.
3. 1996-around 1998. Unresolved. In this period, work was continued on the
building to provide the temporary strengthening as planned, but the build-
ing was standing empty without use or repair. In a publication by the United
States General Accounting Office (1996: 46), the building was cited as an
example of buildings that should not have received earthquake funding
since it was vacant.
4. 1998-2002: Final decisions. A developer was found and the building be-
came part of a development project for the empty lot beside it. At first the
developer considered the demolition of the building, arguing that it was
deteriorated. The owner stated that it preferred not to demolish it due to
the agreement with the ACHP and FEMA, unless it was proven that re-
pairs were unfeasible (Gordon 1999). It was finally decided to keep the
building. In a hearing before the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation
Advisory Board (San Francisco Government 1999: item 7), the owner
proposed a project that included the adaptive reuse and seismic upgrade of
the Williams Building next to a new tower of 430 feet in height for a mixed-
use development featuring hotel rooms, a museum/cultural center, and as-
sociated parking.

With the eight-floor historic building cornered at the base, the project is con-
troversial in terms of the appropriateness of such a solution in relation to the
historic character of the building and its scale. The Williams Building was
preserved as a facade while its interior was completely removed. Such a result
demonstrates how cultural values are challenged after earthquakes.

5 It is a common strategy to use funds attained from FEMA for the repair of a
damaged building for an alternate project.

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FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

Roots of the conflict

Before the conflict developed there were dormant differences between the
involved parties. The values of the groups involved were different. SHPO and
historic preservationists took cultural values into consideration, the owner
focused on economic factors, and FEMA considered related federal laws and
regulations.

The different values of the parties involved affected the goals they had:
• The owner was focused on limiting effort and maximizing return. The
building was damaged and demolition could have brought development
opportunities. The feasibility of repairs was important; thus, the owner
wanted to leave the repair work for the future developer.
• The SHPO and historic preservationists valued saving the building, espe-
cially since many other buildings were unnecessarily lost after the earth-
quake. They both cared about its historic character and fabric. The SHPO
also valued regulations and was interested, as a public agency, in fulfilling
the laws related to the situation.
• FEMA was mainly focused on implementing related procedures and regu-
lations, in addition to reducing the cost. The building was historic; there-
fore Section 106 was triggered. The correspondence documents indicate
that FEMA had no specific position on the discussions between historic
preservationists and the owner, and that FEMA was merely following
procedure. This continued until tensions escalated in 1993; at that point
FEMA adopted a proactive role and sent the owner a letter indicating
other options.

Even when groups had similar goals, conflict existed due to differences of
values. This was the case with SHPO and FEMA, who seemed to be working
together to facilitate recovery, although they sometimes pulled in different
directions. Some respondents identified that as a “hidden conflict.” FEMA
was pushing for a cost reduction, while the SHPO was pushing for treatments
that were sensitive to the historic fabric on the one hand, but increased cost on
the other. This complicated matters for the owner, who had to satisfy both
sides.
The regulatory context provided an environment in which such groups
should have been able to negotiate, as the Section 106 process encouraged
stakeholders to communicate. Yet negotiations failed when, due to safety
concerns, the owner decided to demolish regardless of the other groups in-
volved. While Section 106 allowed for an alternative when such negotiations
fail by involving the ACHP, this does indicate that such negotiations could be
managed differently to prevent similar conflicts. What seems to be missing

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 EARTHQUAKE RECOVERY AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS

from the process is the conflict management approach, which could have
helped during the early years before the negotiations stopped. Having an out-
side party play the role of mediator could help in identifying common ground.
For preservationists, the building was another cultural property that they
were about to lose. Some respondents pointed out that saving the building
gained heightened importance as a reaction to the many demolitions that took
place in a short time, leaving the historic preservation community with feel-
ings of loss. Thus, many arguments were presented on the significance of the
building, the importance of keeping it, and the possibility of reusing it. This
also led to historic preservationists pulling together to provide alternatives for
the use of the building, and working with other culture-related groups toward
that end. This provides an example of how different groups cooperate in a
post-earthquake situation for a specific goal.
The value differences explain the initial stance each group had, but the
conflict escalated, leading to failure of the consultation. The respondents iden-
tified the roots of such a negative development in three main categories:

1. The building itself: the previous neglect and archaic construction materi-
als led the owner to feel that repairs would not be feasible, and the reus-
ability of the building was in question.
2. The people involved: the owner, professionals, preservationists, and rep-
resentatives of government bodies had different roles to play in the recov-
ery. The most prominent issues were as follows:
• Lack of sufficient knowledge about historic preservation and related
laws. Literature has pointed this out, focusing on the importance of
education (Eichenfield 1996: 12–28).
• Lack of knowledge about disaster recovery and FEMA process. This
was cited by literature as well as a cause of complications. Many peo-
ple are unaware that FEMA has a specific process for obtaining fund-
ing, which leads to incorrect assumptions (Eichenfield 1996: 29–30;
Mader 1994: 222, 229).
• The institutional culture of the owner, a public body, was identified by
some respondents as a major cause for the conflict. The management
approach was cited as the reason for the neglect of the building before
the earthquake, and was also a reason why an agreement on how to
repair the building was not achieved with the SHPO.
• The perception of the other groups is important in terms of trust. The
consultation is undermined when any side believes that the other side
has hidden intentions or is not trying to find a solution.
• Attitude of the individuals involved.

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FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

3. The context: This point includes all aspects that create the environment in
which the recovery was taking place. The points below do not cover all
the categories that usually play a role, but they reflect the points that the
respondents identified as important in this case.
• Regulatory context. Laws and regulations create a context defined by
their objectives and processes. There were federal, state, and local
regulatory contexts within which different groups had to function. In
this case three points were made:
– Clarity of related laws and codes: for example, the question of
whether the San Francisco Section 104 (f) code was triggered. The
issue of the codes was also raised in literature in relation to accept-
able risk levels, functionality, codes, and ordinances (cf. Fratessa
1994).
– Clarity of the meaning of the red tag: The owner and the general
public assumed that it meant that the building should be demol-
ished. This is cited as a source of conflict for many buildings after
earthquakes (Nelson 1991: 47–49; Spangle Associates 1999: 18).
– The process in the local government was separated from the state
and federal government, which complicated getting approvals and
permits, as each side had its own requirements.
• The technological context: This reflected the knowledge available to
professionals on archaic construction materials, their strength, and
ways of retrofit.
• The political context: The relationship between the public agencies
involved and their responsibilities creates questions about why the
same project that was initially rejected was eventually approved. The
fact that the building was still standing damaged four years after the
earthquake might have created pressures on the parties involved, lead-
ing to compromises. The politics of how government agencies relate
to each other on different levels (local, state, and federal) and with dif-
ferent roles (redevelopment, historic preservation, disaster recovery) is
worth further investigation.
• The economic context: The feasibility of the repair was in doubt many
times during the many years of negotiations. Literature has pointed
out that more demolitions happen in historic downtown areas that suf-
fer economic depressions than in areas with good economic status, as
the community assumes that demolitions would bring new develop-
ment (Eichenfield 1996:11).
• The social context: Respondents identified the strong preservation cul-
ture in the local community and the existence of preservation activists
as important for post-earthquake recovery of such buildings.

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 EARTHQUAKE RECOVERY AND HISTORIC BUILDINGS

This primary categorization, however, is of the perceptions of the interview-

ees. It is of interest because it shows how professionals in the field perceive
the issue. It is clear that their experience indicated that the building itself was
of limited effect in comparison to the people and the context, both of which
had more input in creating the conflict. Both these categories, the people and
the context, can be improved through education and recovery planning. This
indicates the importance of preparedness for future earthquakes.

Co n c l u s i o n

As literature has pointed out, historic buildings face challenges after earth-
quakes. The interviews indicate that the context and the people involved have
greater importance as conflict generators than the building itself. Understand-
ing the recovery process is important, as it helps in saving effort, time, and
cost. Longer time in recovery leads to higher cost (Al-Nammari 2005).
This study indicates that conflict develops in post-earthquake recovery in
stages. Immediately after an earthquake, individuals involved are interested in
repair and recovery, yet an initial tension exists between stakeholders due to
their different goals and values. Such tension can develop into conflict in later
phases if it is not managed through consultation and arbitration. Such man-
agement should take place early in the recovery period, before conflict esca-
lates. Most of the conflict takes place in relation to funding and financial aid,
which corresponds with Geipel’s findings about conflict during recovery
(Geipel 1982: 171).
As a social process, this study shows how historic buildings can be a con-
tested space in post-earthquake situations. As different groups pull in different
directions for the management of available resources, historic properties ac-
quire different values for different groups.
The objective of this pilot study was to investigate how such conflicts occur
in relation to publicly-owned historic buildings. Further inquiry is needed to
understand the dynamics of conflicts for private buildings. Such investiga-
tions would inform future recovery planning and preparedness, thus reducing
future complications and providing a better understanding of the process and
its players. Also, more research is needed on the value of historic resources in
post-disaster situations, and whether their significance is affected by the dam-
age.

219
FATIMA AL-NAMMARI

I would like to thank David Look, FAIA, the National Park Service, Oakland,
California for his unlimited advice, guidance, and support. I extend my thanks
to Steade Craigo, FAIA, the State Office of Historic Preservation, Sacra-
mento, California and David Gardner, the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity’s Federal Emergency Management Agency, Oakland, California for help
in attaining the necessary documents and files and answering my many ques-
tions. I am also grateful to all the individuals who helped either by being in-
terviewed or by providing guidance and information.

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IV. EXCLUSION, SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE
The Ph enom enon of E x clus i on

HEINZ BUDE

This article aims to elucidate the concept of social exclusion from a phe-
nomenological approach. Exclusion is distinguished from the mere problem
of poverty, based on the three dichotomies: agony and agency, disparity and
cohesion, and the self and the other. Moreover, exclusion denotes a shift in
social responsibility. In analyzing social exclusion as a process of individual
drift, four structural elements are significant—work, family, institutions, and
the human body.

It was the discourse on the new urban underclass that emphatically showed
that social inequality is not only a question of ups and downs but also, and
with more existential relevance, a question of being-in or moving-out. Before
outlining the elements and the dynamics of the vicious circle that takes one
out of society and into a kind of social no-man’s land, some conceptual ques-
tions must be considered. What does the concept of social exclusion mean and
what is meant by a phenomenological approach to it?
In much of Europe in recent years, the discourse on poverty within the
analysis of social problems has been replaced by attention to the broader, ob-
viously more diffuse problem of social exclusion.1 The socially excluded, ac-
cording to this notion, are usually poor, but they suffer from more than just a
shortage of money or material transfer pay; they endure other kinds of depri-
vation and deficits, the cumulative impact of which leaves them detached

1 An International Labour Organisation Report suggests that the concept of social

exclusion can be seen as a replacement for poverty, which provides a multidi-
mensional view of the processes of impoverishment (International Institute for
Labour Studies 1996).

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HEINZ BUDE

from the mainstream of our society. Some scholars see the problem as imply-
ing exclusion from the labor market, from education, from security, from
health, or at least from human rights (cf. Badelt 1999). Other aspects of social
exclusion involve a lack of participation in community life and insufficient
access to social benefits (cf. Atkinson/Hills 1998). So, this is the conclusion,
social exclusion is a problem that requires more than a public transfer to those
in need (cf. Hills/Le Grand/Piachaud 2002).
We seem to know what poverty is about. Poverty is a question of short-
age, lack, and deficiencies in relation to what the majority has, earns, and re-
quires. It is something relative and nothing absolute (cf. Hauser 1997). But,
nevertheless, there are a lot of findings that absolutely prove that poor people
lead less healthy lives, experience more stress, and die earlier. So one could
conclude that all it takes is to provide them with financial aid in order to
change the relationship of those who have and those who have not. But what
is exclusion about? And what does it mean to regard social exclusion as a
phenomenon? There are three aspects that constitute a social fact as a social
phenomenon (Herzog/Graumann 1991).
The first aspect means that we are “addressed” by a phenomenon. We are
captured by experiences that create a rupture in our normal construction of the
world. Let us take the situation at a party where you meet an old friend who
appears set apart from all the others’ way of living. He or she drinks too much
and complains too much. Instinctively, you distance yourself from him or her
because you do not want to be affected by those bad vibrations. In phenome-
nological philosophy, there is the term “fatality,” which is assigned to this ex-
perience of being addressed or struck by a phenomenon.
The second aspect is that we see a phenomenon as a totality in itself. A
phenomenon cannot be reduced to a certain element without destroying its
whole structure. In this sense social exclusion has an effect on all of the di-
mensions of the personal life of an individual: not only on how you consume
or on how you work, but also on how you love and on how you trust. That is
the “totality” of a phenomenon.
Thirdly, a phenomenon implies a certain reflexive effect. The moment we
are captured by it and see it as a whole, we are confronted with ourselves. We
aim to distance ourselves from that friend at the party because there is the
possibility that we could be in his or her place. He or she shows us the thresh-
old of shame that rules out the possibility of being integrated into the commu-
nity of belonging. In the vocabulary of phenomenological philosophy, this is
the idea of “fundamentality.” Faced with someone who is excluded, we are
confronted with the question of what counts as a livable life and as a grievous
death. Obviously, there is a shift in attitude when one replaces the concept of
poverty with that of social exclusion. Through this phenomenological ap-

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proach, the following three implications of the concept of exclusion become

evident:
The first implication involves the difference between agony and agency.
The excluded suffer, as the classical investigation on The Unemployed of
Marienthal shows (Jahoda/Lazarsfeld/Zeisel 1975): they are in some kind of
agony. They have lost or they are losing their focus, their control over the
world. They no longer stand on their own feet. Inclusion, therefore, means to
reconstruct agency. The rhetoric of empowerment, activation, and responsibil-
ity are concentrated in the idea of agency; this concept changed social welfare
politics from the principle of income maintenance to that of preventing social
exclusion. This marked a shift from passive to active policies, from an em-
phasis on responsibilities to rights, a shift from protection to inclusion. In or-
der to reconstruct agency, the enabling state that follows the welfare state
aims no longer to protect labor, but to promote work (cf. Gilbert 2004).
The second difference involved in the concept of exclusion is that of dis-
parity and cohesion. Especially in France, responses to the problem of social
exclusion are embedded in the discussion about the republican nation. Those
who are socially excluded are the pariah of the nation and thus mark a limit
for liberal society. The community of the republican nation cannot bear the
fact that significant parts of the population are on the outside. In this case,
exclusion is connected with the notion of a division between the included and
the excluded (cf. Nasse 1992).2
The third difference implied in the concept of exclusion is that of the self
and the other. In the face of an excluded other, we are confronted with the
question: Who cares (cf. Göttle 2000)? Who cares for those who are losing
control and are being thrown into a state of distrust and hopelessness? It is
obviously inadequate if the state alone, which functions according to the re-
quirements of formal rights and standardized measures, takes on this task. The
concept of social exclusion appeals to a “we” that cannot delegate its respon-
sibility for the other to someone else. Who or what this “we” is, however, is
highly disputed. Is it the nation, the neighborhood, civil society (cf. Walzer
1983), or is it, as Judith Butler would say in the words of Levinas, each of us
as a human being (Butler 2003)?.
At this point it becomes apparent how the concept of social exclusion
leads to a shift in the grounds for social responsibility away from the state
towards something else. In sociological terms, this is a shift from Marshallian
citizenship to Durkheimian membership.3

2 For a general discussion, cf. Silver 1994.

3 As a widely discussed position inbetween, cf. Margalit 1997.

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HEINZ BUDE

What can we do, how can we deal with this concept of social exclusion,
that is, on the one hand, normalized and, on the other hand, dramatized? Is it
more than an intuitive shortcut elaborated in philosophical dimensions?
There are different frames of reference from which studies about social
exclusion typically operate: that of individual drift and that of chronic social
contexts (cf. Mingione 1996). Studies of the second type look at mechanisms
of institutional discrimination and territorial signation. They examine urban
poverty, racial division, and gender relations. What I would like to present in
the following are some results from our analysis of processes of individual
drift. Normally, four structural elements play a role in the processes of social
exclusion: work, family, institution, and the human body (cf. Bude 1998).
To begin with the end: It is the body that the everyday struggle for recog-
nition seems to be focused on. We have this debate about “white trash” on the
one hand, and the emerging beauty culture on the other: mere bodily appear-
ance as a sign of an individual’s lack of responsibility, flexibility, mobility.
You see, smell, and feel someone moving from the zone of precariousness to
that of exclusion. Robert Castel (2000) has promoted the model of social
zooming in order to understand the micro-processes of social inclusion and
exclusion. His main idea is that social exclusion is becoming a possibility that
bridges the center and the edges of society. It could happen to everybody be-
cause of the change not only in the regimes of labor and employment, but also
in the regimes of the family, the state, and the self. Things are getting more
heterogeneous and precarious in all respects. You cannot project the excluded
into a certain social place; they are among us and affect us. For this reason,
the body is of social importance for the determination of one’s position in the
social world.
Of course, a certain kind of job experience is normally the starting point
for a disastrous career. What is less important is the loss of the job itself; what
counts more is experiencing a long period of failure in trying to get back into
employment, which tends to condition people to continue to fail. There is a
type of person, who could be called the “active loser,” who is characterized
by doing everything right at the wrong moment. He or she invests too much
into a certain situation and therefore cuts off all paths of return.
A different type of person shows an inability to adapt to an “alternative
role” that is supposed to secure a socially acceptable way of leaving gainful
employment. A traditional example could be the change of status for a person
who takes on the role of a housewife. Recently, extra “communitarian” bo-
nuses have been awarded for “third sector” activities. But if people are not
successful at regarding loss as a sacrifice, or feel exposed when the neighbors
look at them rather contemptuously, they start to have doubts about the justi-
fication for their own existence.

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 THE PHENOMENON OF EXCLUSION

A third negative experience regarding work would be a person dropping

out of contingent work as a result of an “unusual life-event.” Sudden illness or
an unfortunate accident can pull the rug out from under an attempt to juggle
with different sources of income. The whole economy of a household then
breaks down.
The crisis in the family represents a second decisive factor. In principle,
the crisis engendered by unemployment can lead to the re-establishment of
family solidarity. On the one hand, the “extended family” often proves to be a
secure environment, offering the final point of stability. But this, on the other
hand, increases the vulnerability of people sticking together. Men in particular
suffer from the fear of losing their “normative competence” because of their
employment problems, and this can plunge the whole family system into a
state of vague unrest, which causes everything to become a problem. If the
family support system finally cracks under the strain, the individual who is
left alone has taken a further step down the road towards believing he or she
is superfluous.
Coupled with problems associated with work and family, a third factor of
social exclusion must be considered. The social welfare institutions react de-
cisively when confronted with obvious symptoms of social malaise. Personnel
dealing with unemployment and poverty have their own ideas and theories on
how to treat these people, and such opinions often play a most significant
role. People who appear to be socially unstable will quickly lose their rights to
full benefits in the eyes of officials. This battle for recognition between those
seeking benefits and those awarding them is played out in the micro-situation
of contact within the institution. There has been little research on how claim
limits are defined in everyday situations like these. Whatever the situation,
dependent people experience institutional classification and administrative
assignments as degrading procedures that mark them as dependent beggars. In
extreme cases, they can lose their ability to conform to the institution’s expec-
tations because they end up playing the role the institution expects of them,
and this can lead to ongoing “institutional isolation” (Gans 1995).
The final and most important indication seen in processes of social exclu-
sion is, as mentioned above, the human body. The road to superfluity, the
road out of society, is often marked by one type of addiction taken from the
entire available spectrum. Physical dependence can be seen as the final clo-
sure mechanism initiated by a person to seal the break with the legitimate so-
cial link, with work, the family, and institutions.
What we have in the end is the logic of failure in terms of work, the logic
of break-up in terms of the family, the logic of registration in terms of the in-
stitution, and the logic of stigma in terms of the human body. When these four
components act together, a pattern of feeling superfluous can cumulatively
build up and finally close people to all outside influence. Analysis of these

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HEINZ BUDE

processes shows an irreversible pattern of exclusion based on a loss of re-

sources, bewilderment in the face of imposed sanctions, and the anticipation
of being stigmatized.
If we pursue this analysis, we can distinguish at least three groups: the un-
employed, the poor, and the excluded. There are links between all three, but
no exact congruence. Normally, unemployment is a pre-condition for exclu-
sion, but it is not the only factor. You can be included while being unem-
ployed. Poverty usually is an additional factor, but to be marginalized does
not mean to be excluded. It is possible for a person to come to the end of the
social road despite a personal history that offered adequate provision for ma-
terial needs.
One can see whether a person is excluded. One can see his or her weari-
ness, indifference, or apathy. One is addressed by the other, imagines the to-
tality of his or her life, and feels the urge to ask oneself: Who cares?

Re f e r e n c e s

Atkinson, Anthony/Hills, John (eds., 1998) Exclusion, Employment and Op-

portunity, London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School
of Economics.
Badelt, Christoph (1999) The Role of NPOs in Policies to Combat Social Ex-
clusion; Social Protection Discussion Paper 9912, Washington, D.C.:
World Bank.
Bude, Heinz (1998) “Die Überflüssigen als transversale Kategorie”. In: Peter
A. Berger/Michael Vester (eds.) Alte Ungleichheiten – Neue Spaltungen,
Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp. 363–382.
Butler, Judith (2003) Kritik der ethischen Gewalt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-
kamp.
Castel, Robert (2000) Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage, Konstanz:
UVK.
Gans, Herbert J. (1995) The War Against the Poor. The Underclass and Anti-
poverty Policy. New York: Basic Books.
Gilbert, Neil (2004) Transformation of the Welfare State. The Silent Surren-
der of Public Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Göttle, Gabriele (2000) Die Ärmsten! Wahre Geschichten aus dem arbeits-
losen Leben, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
Hauser, Richard (1997) Armut, Armutsgefährdung und Armutsbekämpfung in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und
Statistik 216, Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, pp. 524–548.

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 THE PHENOMENON OF EXCLUSION

Herzog, Max/Graumann, Carl F. (1991, eds.) Sinn und Erfahrung. Phänome-

nologische Methoden in den Humanwissenschaften, Heidelberg: Asanger
1991.
Hills, John/Le Grand, Julian/Piachaud, David (eds., 2002) Understanding So-
cial Exclusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
International Institute for Labour Studies (ed., 1996) Social Exclusion and
Anti-Poverty Strategies, Geneva: International Labour Organisation.
Jahoda, Marie/Lazarsfeld, Paul/Zeisel, Hans (1975/1933) Die Arbeitslosen
von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen lan-
gandauernder Arbeitslosigkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Margalit, Avishai (1997) Politik der Würde. Über Achtung und Verachtung,
Berlin: Fest.
Mingione, Enzo (1996) “Preface”. In Enzo Migione (ed.) Urban Poverty and
The Underclass, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, pp. XII–XIX.
Nasse, Philippe (1992) Exclus et exclusion: Connaitre les Populations, Com-
prendre les Processus, Paris: Commissariat Général du Plan.
Silver, Hilary (1994) “National Conceptions of the New Urban Poverty:
Structural Change in Britain, France and the United States”. International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, pp. 336–354.
Walzer, Michael (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and
Equality, New York: Basis Books.

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Orbit P al ac e.
Locat ion s and Culture s of R edundant Ti me

SILKE STEETS

In eastern Germany, we currently observe how traditional forms of European

urbanity degenerate through dramatic shrinkage. My contribution starts from
empirical observations collected within an art project, “Orbit Palace,” which
deals with the complex structures of space against the background of redun-
dant time in shrinking cities. On the basis of three heterogeneous case studies,
I will analyze the underlying spatial micro politics and conclude with possi-
bilities of urbanity today.

Having time, the journalist Verena Mayer argued in July 2003, no longer de-
termines whether we do something or not (Mayer 2003: 17). The polite phrase
“I don’t have time!” has lost some of its argumentative power, because in our
society people tend to have too much time. For German standards, the
unemployment rate has been consistently high for years, and Mayer claims
that this fact, as well as the fear of those who (still) earn an income, but are
afraid of losing their job, are the reasons for this development. She concludes
that having “spare time has been stigmatized” (ibid). In contrast to the 1980s,
when the reduction of working hours and the observance of Sunday as a day
of rest were eagerly contested issues, the worth of disposable free time seems
to be diminishing, and the value of work is increasing progressively. The dis-
tribution of labor and spare time has once again become an indicator of class
difference. But today the signs are reversed: jobs are scarce and greatly de-
sired, and time is something for those without a job.
The following thoughts deal with the unequal distribution of time and labor
in the context of Germany’s shrinking cities, as well as with strategies that in-

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SILKE STEETS

dividuals have developed to cope with little work, little money, and much time.
The process of urban shrinking creates not only space but also time. In part the
result of radical deindustrialization, space and spare time are widely available
in these shrinking cities, but labor is not. In order to explore this issue, I will
turn to Leipzig, a city whose population decreased by 63,000, or 11.2 percent,
between 1990 and 2003 (Statistisches Landesamt des Freistaates Sachsen
2005). Currently about 20 percent of the city’s working population is unem-
ployed (Stadt Leipzig-Amt für Statistik und Wahlen 2005). In reference to the
postcolonial perspective, which confronts the normative model of the European
City with the urban reality of the rapidly growing mega-cities of the south, I
will investigate the opposite of growth: shrinkage. I will assume that the rapid
shrinkage of cities questions notions of European urbanity just as rapidly as
growth does. The key question I will explore is: How does a city shrink? Where
can we observe this process and what exactly happens at these locations? I
hope to find answers to these questions by means of micro-sociological case
studies. More specifically: how do people spend their time when their days are
not—or rather, are no longer—determined by the rigid timetable of Fordist
production methods and they live in regions that are characterized by
deindustrialization and a lot of redundant space? And: What spaces do they
create—often unintentionally—to pursue their activities, or as a result of them?
The artistic research project “Orbit Palace,” which I conceived together
with an architect, two artists, and a photographer in Leipzig, and which was
part of the exhibition “Shrinking Cities” at KW-Institute for Contemporary Art
in Berlin in 2004,1 explores similar questions. We used the title “Orbit Palace”
as a search word for those locations that have become the home for redundant
time. They are spaces that are no longer, or not yet, part of economic and social
memories as the result of complex transformational processes. They are loca-
tions that signify a breach with the past and whose future appears similarly
vague: derelict buildings, fallow land, abandoned infrastructures, ruins, and
new cityscapes. At first glance these locations give the impression of being
post-urban leftovers or holes in European cities. As part of the project, we
documented in great detail how seven such locations are used today and dis-
covered that those using them employ very different practices in doing so. I
will now look in greater detail at two locations featured in the “Orbit Palace”
project. Subsequently, I will tie the project and related findings into the context
of current research on poverty, and will conclude my article by speculating on
possibilities relating to the creation of urbanity in shrinking cities.

1 The full title of the project, which was done by Jens Fischer, Katja Heinecke,
Reinhard Krehl, Silke Steets, and Nils Emde is: “Orbit Palace. Time Pioneers in
Space,” Schrumpfende Städte // Shrinking Cities, KW-Institute for Contempo-
rary Art, Berlin (Sept. 4 to Nov. 7, 2004).

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 ORBIT PALACE. LOCATIONS AND CULTURES OF REDUNDANT TIME

The spontaneous angler

Leipzig North, triangular junction, rainwater storage facility (Figure 1). He

can organize his day as he pleases, because the construction companies hire
him according to demand. Whenever the weather is right and the construction
company does not call him, he goes fishing—sometimes as long as half a day.
He travels by bike. In his bag he carries some snacks and canned sweet corn,
which he uses as bait. He always crosses the railroad tracks and climbs down
the embankment. He always casts his line into the wind because, as he claims,
“carps can smell you.”

Figure 1: Spontaneous angler (Photo: © Nils Emde, 2003)

He is very alert and knows where to find a shoal of fish. He returns every sin-
gle fish he catches back to the lake. He only likes salt-water fish and the only
carp he ever took home he brought back to the lake the following day.
He calls this place “paradise.” It is peaceful at the lake, and once he has
turned off his cell phone he is all by himself. He hates having to stand in line
and wait. While fishing he only waits for himself. He needs nobody’s assis-
tance to do so. He refuses to have anything to do with fishing clubs and he has
no fishing permit. He does not need one anyhow because the lake is outside
anyone’s jurisdiction. It is the product of a coincidence that was created in the
course of the great modifications that were applied to the infrastructure of
Leipzig North. A rainwater storage pond located in the midst of a triangular

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SILKE STEETS

junction—found between the exhibition center, the highway, and the new
manufacturing plants of Porsche and BMW. As a result of the development of
certain parts of Leipzig, a new landscape is emerging.
Fernando S. is forty-two years old, divorced, and lives together with his
girlfriend. He came to the GDR from Cuba at the age of twenty-two. Upon his
arrival he trained as a railroad builder. Later on he was an engine driver at an
opencast mine—always in the better-paid three-shift system. He has been un-
employed since 1992. Today he gets by with the help of welfare and the occa-
sional small construction job. He claims he is a good handyman. He has reno-
vated and modernized several apartments already. Fernando says he did such
a good job renovating one apartment that even the West German landlord was
impressed with it. The neighbors in the allotment colony were equally im-
pressed. Initially they were skeptical when a foreigner moved into the sum-
merhouse next to theirs. After he renovated it for a whole summer he invited
everyone over, and from that moment on his neighbors accepted him. He likes
it in Germany. But if it should get too cold one day, he will return to Cuba. In
terms of his private life this would not be a problem. His girlfriend speaks
perfect Spanish.

The in-between trader

Leipzig West, a residential area built during the late nineteenth century, empty
buildings. The lobby (Figure 2). The sweatshirts, which advertise the waste-
paper collection facility, read, “Money is lying in the streets.” He and his wife
appreciate the value of trash and they are still familiar with the GDR’s SERO
system, the secondary raw material recycling system. Today’s massive recy-
cling industry inspired their business idea, which will hopefully enable them
to break out of the job brokerage cycle of the unemployment agency. Their
clients collect wastepaper for them and deliver it to their facility, they pay
them at the current rate and, after having separated paper from cardboard,
they resell it. The price their buyer pays is not guaranteed. They know that
“the price for a kilogram of wastepaper fluctuates like that for pork.” The
prices arrive via fax in their “office,” which is the telephone in their apart-
ment. The profit margin is approximately 4 cents per kilogram. They have
monthly expenses—including accounting, rent, public liability insurance, and
the transportation of the paper—a minimum of 120 euros. This means: They
make a profit if they sell more than 3 tons of wastepaper a month. Most of
their clients live in the immediate vicinity of the collection facility. Many of
them are superintendents, who collect the wastepaper in the lobbies of the
buildings they work in and then drop it off.

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 ORBIT PALACE. LOCATIONS AND CULTURES OF REDUNDANT TIME

Figure 2: In-between trader (Photo: © Nils Emde, 2003)

But private individuals, neighbors, and friends are also among their clients,
even many children, who seem to enjoy collecting wastepaper. Their opening
hours depend on two factors: the season and the job center. Their business is
located in a house that awaits demolition. Their landlord has given them per-
mission to use the building’s lobby as a shop until the building is demolished.
But there is no electricity, and therefore no electric lighting, which greatly
restricts winter opening hours. The second factor that influences their busi-
ness is the job center. They are only allowed to work fifteen hours a week.
Anything else is illegal. But according to him, there is so much to do that they
could work around the clock.

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SILKE STEETS

Günter P. is forty years old and a trained bricklayer. Due to back pain, he
has been unable to work since the early 1990s. He is married to Ursula, who
is thirty-seven years old and a trained nursery school teacher. She lost her job
in 1992, and in the years that followed she gave birth to two sons. Since then
she has been on maternity leave, received unemployment benefits, and been
on welfare. During the nineties her husband held countless jobs, ranging from
“maid” in a hotel to a forest ranger. In 2003 both of them had had enough.
Something had to change, and one day they saw an advertisement for a
wastepaper collection facility. “We can do what others can do, too!” Many
visits to the social security office and the unemployment agency followed,
then a useless seminar for people interested in founding a small business, until
he finally founded a so-called Ich-AG, a one-man business. They will receive
support from the state for a period of three years. All net profits go directly to
the social security office. During the period that they receive support they
must succeed in turning their company into a viable business. This is why she
too started to work fifteen hours per week—the amount approved by the un-
employment agency—for the company.

Leipzig PlusMinus

Leipzig is located on the edge of Germany’s most intensively industrialized

region east of the Harz Mountains, and much of the region’s brown coal min-
ing, energy-generation industries, and chemical industries have been located
here since the late nineteenth century. For that reason, the number of plant
closures and the massive layoffs that took place in the region after East-West
reunification have been unrivaled. Between 1990 and 1993 more than eighty
percent of industrial jobs were cut. In Leipzig alone this amounted to roughly
90,000 factory jobs (Rink 2004: 636). It was impossible to compensate for
this loss by creating jobs in the third sector. However, the economic decline
of the region is only one reason for the population decline that Leipzig subse-
quently suffered. A second factor is the declining birth rate, and a third factor
is the West German, or rather US-style, suburbanization of living and work-
ing. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Leipzig holds a special place in
the discourse on urban shrinkage, because the city is shrinking and growing at
the same time. At least that is the conclusion drawn by authors of the research
project “Leipzig 2030” (Lütke Daldrup/Doehler-Behzadi 2004). This research
projects the development of the city for the two decades to come, and accord-
ing to the authors the product of this bipolar process is the “perforated city.”
Leipzig is characterized both by empty apartment houses and extensive decay
as well as by selective growth and the successful renovation of the city’s his-
toric district that dates back to the late nineteenth century. This explains why,

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 ORBIT PALACE. LOCATIONS AND CULTURES OF REDUNDANT TIME

especially in northern Leipzig—the area around the highway, the airport, the
exhibition center, the brand-new DHL logistics center, and the plants of the
automobile manufacturers Porsche and BMW—is booming. The simultaneity
of growth and shrinkage produces a spatial dynamic, and the significant struc-
tural changes make this most visible. Borders are redefined, territories are used
differently—and therefore their relevance for society is changing as well—
and many spaces appear barren. As a result, locations emerge that do not cor-
respond to the traditional image of European urbanity but are nonetheless part
of the everyday lives of people living in the European city of Leipzig. The
two places I am talking about serve as examples to illustrate this process. The
lake frequented by the spontaneous angler is located in the midst of the eco-
nomic growth zone in Leipzig North and it is a by-product of infrastructural
construction measures. The late nineteenth-century building awaiting demoli-
tion used by the in-between trader is located in Leipzig West, a borough that
is affected by decay and urban shrinkage. Yet, contrary to what one might be
inclined to assume, neither transitory location is fallow. The activities that
take place in these locations might just as well symbolize that urban space is
used in new and different ways. But how can we comment on spending time
in these places?

Autonomists, entrepreneurs, and creative people

In case he does not receive a call from the construction company, the sponta-
neous angler spends his day as he pleases. He considers spare time to be a
gain in personal freedom. No clock determines his day. For him, fishing is a
contemplative activity, something like meditation. While at the lake, he dis-
connects his personal time from society’s macro-time—for as long as he
wants. Yet despite his spontaneity, his life does not lack temporal structures.
He very clearly differentiates between, for example, those workdays during
which he goes fishing and the weekend, which he prefers to spend with his
girlfriend. The in-between trader organizes his time much more around exter-
nal influences. The wastepaper collection facility determines the rhythm of
his day and its opening hours depend on factors over which he has no control:
the season and the stipulations of the unemployment agency. Yet there is also
plenty to do after the store has closed. He must collect, sort, and separate pa-
per and cardboard. He never has much time and this requires him to be very
organized. He has no time for hobbies such as tending a garden plot or going
on excursions with his children, not even on the weekend. These two exam-
ples illustrate how different people, for whom the early 1990s marked a deci-
sive point in their biographies because they lost their jobs, experience and
design time. The spontaneous angler uses the surplus of spare time, the result

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SILKE STEETS

of his unemployment, to his advantage and thinks of the benefits caused by a

slow-paced life and greater freedom. By founding an Ich-AG that deals with
waste paper, the in-between trader created a new job for himself and he feels
—also in terms of time—the economic pressure that comes with being self-
employed.
Four Dutch researchers had already established a similar spectrum of mi-
cro-social time cultures among long-term unemployed and illegal migrants
(Engbersen/Schuyt et al. 1993). It should be emphasized that their study con-
cludes that people without work experience and spend time very differently,
because this result stands in stark contrast to the findings published during the
1930s in the so-called Marienthal Study (Jahoda/Lazarsfeld et al. 1975). The
Marienthal Study called attention to the different attitudes towards unem-
ployment, but—with regards to how these people spend their time—it paints a
very homogenous picture. The Dutch study “Cultures of Unemployment,”
which uses the concept “culture” in an anthropological way, differs: “Culture
pertains to the social environment in which people function, but [it] also per-
tains to the symbols, ideas and convictions that regulate and justify their ac-
tions and serve as a basis and justification for their social relations” (Eng-
bersen/Schuyt et al. 1993: 158). Mental representations, as well as individu-
ally created structures of time, may thus be seen as a part of culture. And
where the Marienthal Study only determined four types of long-term unem-
ployed people, the Dutch study identifies six different ones: the conformists
(36 %), the ritualists (9 %), the retreatists (25 %), the enterprising types (10 %),
the calculating types (9 %), and the autonomists (10 %) (Engbersen 1993: 157).
Significantly, the characterization of the autonomists resembles what we
have already heard about the spontaneous angler. According to the study, the
so-called autonomists

have neither a problem with spending nor structuring their time. Being able to determine
how they spend their time is the most precious good for autonomists. While retreatists, con-
formists and ritualists often capitulate in the face of a surplus of time and the enterprising
ones as well as calculating types complain about the lack of time, the autonomists assume a
totally different position: they shape time according to their will and they do not experience
it as a threat or obstacle to their social life. The autonomists claim that they are hardly ever
bored. Instead they greatly value their freedom and spare time, which come along with un-
employment. The autonomists spend their time according to their ideas, and they use it to
grow in character independently. They ignore social pressure exerted on them by other peo-
ple, groups and institutions (Engbersen 2004: 110f.).

In contrast, the in-between trader is perhaps best described as an enterprising

type, who tries to augment his welfare benefits by taking on formal and in-
formal jobs. Enterprising types often (65 percent) keep a calendar, which sug-
gests that they try to structure their time effectively. They cannot complain
about a lack of meaningful activities in their lives, and, as a result, they are

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integrated into a network of intense social contacts—clientele in the case of

the in-between trader.
Describing further protagonists of “Orbit Palace” could expand the spec-
trum of micro-social Zeitkulturen, or, time cultures. In addition to the figures
described above, it includes the figures of the club maker, the free riders, the
cat’s mummy, the snack bar family, and the football partisans. At this point I
would like to cite one more brief example. The location I am going to talk
about is a former stove-fitter’s shop, located near unhitched railroad tracks.

Figure 3: Club maker (Photo: © Nils Emde, 2003)

During my interview with the main activist at this site, I showed him a photo
of the site (Figure 3) and asked him to tell me what he saw. Simon P. replied:

(Laughing) it’s an interesting photo, for sure. Because at first glance you don’t suspect any-
thing. You only see this sign, which is broken anyhow. We’re going to get a new sign, too. So,
you just don’t expect anything further. Behind the door. You’re thinking, dunno, basically
nothing. Because if you want your gig to be a commercial success you normally would have
to advertise it properly. Somethin’ like that (laughing) (Interview Distillery, Fall 2003).

The photo showed the entrance to a quite well-known techno club in Leipzig.
Between 1992 and 1994, ten students ran the place without a permit, but now
the club has a lease and a liquor license. Legality brought a number of admin-
istrative obligations, but also the ability to plan ahead when, for example,

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making a deal with a brewery or booking artists. Today the club is no longer
run by the ten students, and the person whose name is on the trading license is
chiefly responsible. This man spends ten to fourteen hours every day booking
artists, creating the program, accounting, paying bills, organizing volunteers
to help with the renovation of the club, taking care of press relations, ordering
beverages, maintaining the club’s website, and organizing the graphic design
for the flyers, the visuals, and, not least, the music. The club is open for busi-
ness Friday through Sunday from 10pm until 6am. As a former member of
Leipzig’s subculture, the club owner has learned that you cannot separate
work and leisure. He is one of the protagonists of the local culture industry,
people who were once “flexible rebels and girlies” (Holert/Terkessidis 1996:
9). Today many of them are flexible entrepreneurs who work in fields that
promise a high degree of identification, but also bring great economic insecu-
rity with them. Angela McRobbie explored the fashion and club scene in
London and discovered that the commodification of cultural activities gave
rise to an exciting mixture of self-realization and coolness on the one hand,
and consistent poverty on the other (McRobbie 1999).

Co n c l u s i o n : I n - b e t w e e n s p a c e s

The idea of the European city has long been considered a guiding model for
worldwide urbanization. Urbanists only spoke of cities when the following
characteristics applied: The physical body of the city had to be dense, hetero-
geneously used, and clearly defined, public trade had to flourish, civil society
needed to be committed, and the public and private realm had to be clearly
separated. In recent years it looked as if this model had become obsolete. Wal-
ter Siebel, for example, called the European city a “backwardly oriented uto-
pia” and a leftover “shell of nineteenth-century society” (Siebel 29.07.2000:
7). Yet lately, the model has been regaining popularity:

It seems like the “European city” and the myth that goes with the concept radiate imaginary
powers that affect not only the nostalgic but various analytical and political theories also per-
ceive it as a possible anchor that might offer protection against the trials of “globalization” and
the unpleasantries that stem from it: A social division on a global scale, for example, which
would manifest itself in the urban sphere as fortified gated communities for the affluent and
marginalized slums and boroughs for losers, could be juxtaposed with the model of the Euro-
pean city, which tried in vain to integrate all social groups. In addition, the futile but uncondi-
tional mixture of and encounters between members of all social strata and the blend of the
unfamiliar within the realm of the bourgeois-European city can be pitted against the commer-
cial privatization and repressive surveillance of urban space (Becker/Burbaum et al. 2003: 8).

I would like to propose a perspective that differs from this line of argument,
which complains about current urban developments and considers the (back-
ward) utopia of the European city a way out. For this purpose it is useful to

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recall the discourse on the postcolonial city, which systematically undermines

the geographic unambiguity of “the West and the rest” as well as ideas of a
civil Europe and a chaotic South. If we assume a postcolonial perspective
when looking at a European city like Leipzig, it is possible to articulate the
variety of current urban products “from the outside in.” Furthermore, it so
happens that the “perforated city” does not have holes: it only has them if the
European urban model serves as a backdrop for their discussion. However,
these holes are actually sites where what Hartmut Häußermann and Walter
Siebel call “placeless urbanity” is emerging. Häußermann and Siebel argue
that:

Urbanity has […] not disappeared but like modern labor it has become placeless […] You
cannot build urbanity because it rejects being purposefully staged, and it does not emerge
overnight. But it is connected to locations, where it both takes shape and can be experi-
enced. Such locations result from the city’s aging and decaying, which create gaps inside
which urban life may unfold. […] Because the retiring industrial society abandons empty
factories and leaves outmoded infrastructure behind, cities age much faster again and, as a
result, urban spaces may emerge. […] Urban planning may only influence these processes
by tolerating them but most times they build on top of them. In order to preserve urban cit-
ies, planning must allow for in-between spaces and transition zones, and build architecture
that has the capacity to age and survive gaps, decay and misuse (Häußermann/Siebel 2000).

And perhaps these “placeless locations” will—due to the activities of club

maker, spontaneous angler, in-between trader, and others—give rise to new
forms of economic activities and social actions. These sites could serve as the
nucleus for an economy of solidarity: an economy that does not only include
the affluent and is not exclusively based on commerce. In short, an economy
that constitutes a counterweight to the destructive tendencies of neo-liberalism.
Looking at the informal sectors in African, Asian, and eastern European coun-
tries, Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf report on local forms of economic
and societal cooperation that seek to transcend direct dependence on the mar-
ket: cooperative consortia in Chile, barter trade in Romania, or so called
“orçamento participativo,” a democratic instrument of city planning and budget
participation in Brazil, are examples of such emancipative projects (Altvater/
Mahnkopf 2003). If local initiatives were supported and networked on a global
level—through NGOs for instance—Altvater/Mahnkopf believe that “new
forms of socio-economic security that will prevent a possible ‘globalization of
insecurities’ will emerge” (ibid: 29). In this sense, the title of the “Orbit Palace”
project symbolizes the utopian spark, which—despite all inhospitableness—is
inherent in all the locations about which I have spoken.

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Re f e r e n c e s

Altvater, Elmar/Mahnkopf, Birgit (2003) “Die Informalisierung des urbanen

Raums”. In Jochen Becker/Claudia Burbaum/Martin Kaltwasser, et al.
(eds.) Learning from*—Städte von Welt, Phantasmen der Zivilgesellschaft,
informelle Organisation, Berlin: b_books, pp. 17-30.
Becker, Jochen/Burbaum, Claudia/Kaltwasser, Martin, et al. (eds.) (2003)
Learning from*—Städte von Welt, Phantasmen der Zivilgesellschaft, in-
formelle Organisation, Berlin: b_books.
Engbersen, Godfried (2004) “Zwei Formen der sozialen Ausgrenzung: Lang-
fristige Arbeitslosigkeit und illegale Immigration in den Niederlanden”. In
Hartmut Häußermann/Martin Kronauer/Walter Siebel (eds.) An den Rän-
dern der Städte. Armut und Ausgrenzung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
pp. 99-121.
Engbersen, Godfried/Schuyt, Kees/Timmer, Jaap, et al. (1993) Cultures of
Unemployment. A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and
Urban Poverty, Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press.
Holert, Tom/Terkessidis, Mark (eds.) (1996) Mainstream der Minderheiten.
Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft, Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv.
Häußermann, Hartmut/Siebel, Walter (2000) Stadt und Urbanität, [Link]
[Link]/Themen/Stadtplanung/[Link], (accesed: 14.03.2003).
Jahoda, Marie/Lazarsfeld, Paul F./Zeisel, Hans (1975) Die Arbeitslosen von
Marienthal, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Lütke Daldrup, Engelbert/Doehler-Behzadi, Marta (eds.) (2004) Plusminus
Leipzig 2030. Stadt in Transformation, Wuppertal: Verlag Müller + Bus-
mann KG.
Mayer, Verena (08.07.2003) “Freizeit für alle!” Frankfurter Rundschau, pp. 17.
McRobbie, Angela (1999) “Kunst, Mode und Musik in der Kulturgesell-
schaft”. In Justin Hoffmann/Marion von Osten (eds.) Das Phantom sucht
seinen Mörder. Ein Reader zur Kulturalisierung der Ökonomie, Berlin:
b_books, pp. 15-42.
Rink, Dieter (2004) “Aufbau und Verfall einer Industrieregion”. In Philipp
Oswalt (eds.) Schrumpfende Städte. Band 1: Internationale Untersuchun-
gen, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 632-639.
Siebel, Walter (29.07.2000) “Urbanität als Lebensweise ist ortlos geworden”.
Frankfurter Rundschau, pp. 7.
Stadt Leipzig—Amt für Statistik und Wahlen, (31.12.2004): [Link]
de/business/wistandort/zahlen/arbeitsmarkt/arbeitslose/, (accessed: 15.08.2005).
Statistisches Landesamt des Freistaates Sachsen: Kreisstatistik 2004 für Leipzig,
Stadt, (01.01.2004): htttp://[Link]/Index/22kreis/unterseite
22. htm, (accessed: 15.08.2005).

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Pa cif ic at io n b y D e sig n :
An Et hnograph y of Norm aliz at ion Te chniqu es

LARS FRERS

Conflicts are produced in specific spatial and material settings. The place-
ment of things, the way visibility is established, the accessibility of areas—all
of these aspects of built space participate in the production of human action
in the city. Drawing on ethnographies of Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, and of
railway stations and ferry terminals in Germany and Scandinavia, this text
analyzes the processes by which normalities are produced in tangible socio-
spatial constellations.

The design of urban places is an integral aspect of the conflicts emerging or

taking place in urban space. In cases of open conflict, the spatial and material
aspects of the situation configure its development, while at the same time, the
action might reconfigure the spatial and material setup. Cobblestones present
themselves as thrown weapons, cars become barricades, dead ends become
traps, and, in the streets of Beijing, bicycles can become effective messenger
vehicles (cf. Dingxin 1998). However, space and materiality usually play
more subtle roles in urban life. They are silent participants in everyday life,
nudging people in certain directions, hiding things or exposing them; they can
induce pain and uneasiness, comfort and pleasure. Taken together, space and
materiality participate in the production of localized normalities that have a
regulating influence on the behavior of people in these localities. In this pa-
per, I will reconstruct the ways in which these normalities are produced in

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publicly accessible spaces like plazas and terminals, focusing on the mostly
silent and successful evasion of conflicts: pacification by design.1
Although I will analyze digital video recordings, I will only be able to pre-
sent them as stills, loosing what is most important about this valuable source:
its temporal or dynamic character and the recorded sound.2 This material is
then enriched by my perceptions both of the surroundings and of myself, of
how I feel and how I react to certain situations. An advantage of systemati-
cally analyzing your own perceptions and feelings is the privileged access one
has to one’s own sensual perception. I deal with these perceptions in a phe-
nomenologically informed way, mostly based on Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenome-
nology of Perception” (1962). In this perspective, sensual perceptions are not
seen as a set of instruments that split the world into different parts. The act of
perceiving is a process that unfolds in a specific context.
Working from this perspective means to focus less on meaning as it is as-
cribed in language, addressing concrete experience instead. In the context of
this study, discourse about places is therefore ignored; Lefèbvre’s “spatial
practice” occupies my attention (Lefèbvre 1991: 33–46). This certainly does
not mean that the representational or the discursive is unimportant—it is, by
definition, more visible and more explicit than the subtle behavioral adjust-
ments that are required to produce and reproduce the spatial and social urban
order. Exactly because of the fact that this subtlety is so easily overlooked and
yet extremely effective, I want to make it stand out more clearly.
The photograph on the right side, taken with a digital camcorder during
the early afternoon of a pleasant day in June, can be used as an introduction
into the spatial relations and material aspects that permeate situated social
behavior. The photo was taken in the main railway station of Leipzig. People
using this terminal experience its architecture, the things inside the building,
the distances, the volume. Entrances allow access into the building, opening a
horizon of activities. Entering the station with the escalator from the shopping
mall that lies below, one is confronted with more than forty paces of open
space directly in the foreground, a distance that has to be crossed to reach
whatever goal one is looking for. To get to where they are, the young couple
on the photo had to turn left, passing between the trashcan and the signpost.
Continuing on to the escalator, the man with the backpack had to make a
sharp right turn around the trashcan. Others walk through the enormous hall
that stretches itself over a length of more than 200 meters. The privileged po-

1 I have been inspired to both this study and this terminology by Sharon Zukin,
who talks about “domestication by cappuccino” (Zukin 1995: xiv), and by Lyn
Lofland’s chapter on “Control by Design” in her book on the public realm (Lofland
1998: 179-227).
2 Video clips are available on my website: [Link]
[Link].

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lice officers in the central background of the photo entered the station with
their car, only walking the short distance from its doors to the entrance of the
terminal’s police station.

Figure 1: Spatial relations and materiality. Main hall, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, June 2004
(Photo: © Lars Frers)

All of these people are in viewing and shouting distance of each other, not nec-
essarily taking note, but potentially being aware of each other—the boy, for
example, is looking straight at the observer while he passes by. These are a few
of the socio-spatial relations that can be discerned in this printed photograph.
Let us take a look at the materiality of the place. The floor is made of polished
stone tiles in light colors with darker stripes sweeping through the hall. Most of
the time, this kind of floor is too cool to sit on. It also reflects the light that is
shining in through the milk glass roof and through the train hall in the back of
the figure. Opacity is of great importance; both the railing of the escalator and
the wall that separates the terminal hall from the train hall are made of glass,
exposing the things that happen behind them visible to the eyes of others. The
signpost and the trashcan are anchored to the ground; even though they might
be in the way, they will resist being moved without the use of tools.
In the following part of the paper, I will analyze the spatial and material
aspects of social settings along the lines offered by distinct experiences: those
of the eye, of the moving body, of the eyes and ears in conjunction, and those
of the lingering body.

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Visi bility—self-regulati on

In built spaces, walls are the main devices that establish visual separation.
Depending on the opacity of these walls, seeing through is either impossible,
reduced to shapes, or allows full view. Usually, these walls are static, rigid
barriers that necessitate circumvention. Examples for exceptions to these rules
are walls that are made up of plants or trees, or curtains that can be pulled
aside. The specific materiality of the wall produces different kinds of visibil-
ity. However, visibility is also established through lighting. The way in which
shadows fall, the placement, power, and color of lamps, the angle of the sun,
or the fullness of the moon expose or hide things and people.

Figure 2: Visibility. Waiting booth, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, June 2004

(Photo: © Lars Frers)

In the case shown in Figure 2, opacity is a carefully implemented feature of

the glass walls surrounding the waiting booth on a railway platform. The wait-
ing booth is a place that serves several purposes that are potentially conflict-
ing. For many people, one of the most important aspects of waiting for their
trains is the fear of missing their train. Having a view of the track on which
the train will roll in is the best way to provide a sense of security and control
to waiting passengers (cf. Radlbeck 1981: 14). At the same time, a relaxed
waiting atmosphere also requires both protection from unpleasant environ-
mental influences, and some degree of intimacy for those waiting. The glass
walls of this booth are adapted to these requirements, allowing a view of the
tracks on both sides of the platform, and providing some protection from

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harmful micro-climatic effects. Their most outstanding feature is probably the

way in which the opaque stripes provide more protection from sight for the
lower part of the body, especially when sitting, while allowing a view out of
the booth (and into it for people on the outside). It is opaque enough to reduce
the exposedness of those inside, while at the same time the gaze can pass into
and out of the booth. Due to this specific arrangement, another effect is
achieved: the waiting booth is a place in which many kinds of deviance could
be observed from the outside. Vagrants and homeless have a hard time hiding
here, if one was singing or playing music on a boom box, one would be heard;
a fight would be seen and heard too. The design of this booth manages visibil-
ity in such a way that people using this place are made aware of their partial
visibility. They are made aware of the fact that they are supposed to regulate a
significant part of their conduct according to the expectations of others.3 Ges-
tures and movements that are big enough and/or that take place on a sufficient
height should comply with the rules of the house and, even more so, with the
unspoken rules of conduct in a terminal.
This self-regulation according to the expectations of others works particu-
larly well in that it does not require the presence of dedicated personnel or
technical devices that exert more or less open control. Architecture that offers
many niches and corners, on the other hand, is inviting shady activities. As
can be seen in Figure 3, in the local context of a niche these activities might
even be openly displayed—the adolescent in the center of the group of five is
smoking a cigarette and puffing the smoke in my direction.

Figure 3: Niches. Linkstraße, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, May 2001

(Photo: © Lars Frers)

3 The classic studies of symbolic interactionists, and ethnomethodologists in gen-

eral, are important references in this context (cf. Goffman 1971; Garfinkel 1984,
and others).

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These corners and niches might therefore require the installation of one-way
seeing devices like surveillance cameras or windows that act as one-way mir-
rors. These devices serve to establish a sense of, at least potentially, perma-
nent observation according to which people should behave. If the installation
of these devices is problematic, the presence of security personnel becomes
more relevant—in the course of a guided tour through the security facilities of
the main railway station in Frankfurt,4 the responsible manager, for example,
was quite explicit about how quickly vagrants discover dead ends or blind
corners and how it is one of the main duties of the terminal’s security patrols
to cover these spots.
Finally, I want to mention one other important factor that determines how
visibility is constituted: the density of people moving through or spending
time at a place. This case is most obvious for crowds; during the time I spent
in the Potsdamer Platz area I often witnessed several hundred people leaving
the local musical theater in a short time span. They gathered at the exits, talk-
ing more loudly with growing numbers. When they walked away they left
traces: the normally well-cleaned ground would be littered by debris. In a
crowd, individuals are not as distinct as they are in less dense social situa-
tions, the level of observation sinks, dropping stuff and pick pocketing will
often go unnoticed.

Movement—channeling

Regarding crowds, control of individual behavior is difficult to attain. Other

aspects of the environment come into play. The movement of people through
space, the crossing of streets, passing through halls, walking into open spaces,
happens according to the material setup of the locale. Again, walls are proba-
bly the most effective obstacles. Depending on their mass, structural stability,
height, and texture, they are the prototypical, rigid material obstacle that peo-
ple won’t challenge, instead adapting themselves with regard to their position
and direction.
The map (Figure 4) shows the layout of the surroundings of the Marlene-
Dietrich-Platz (marked with a star), the width of the arrows indicates how
many people come and go into which direction. The musical theater to the left
also serves as the “Berlinale Palace” during the annual film festival, when
large crowds are common in this area. The setup of water around the Marlene-
Dietrich-Platz serves as a rather peculiar, and particularly efficient, crowd-
management device. It blocks access to the entry of the Berlinale Palace with-

4 Organized in November 2004 by Sergej Stoetzer, Institute for Sociology, Darm-

stadt University of Technology.

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out blocking sight, and it keeps the crowd from pressing into the fences that
are set up for the span of the Berlinale. The water, along with fences and
walls, blocks certain areas, channeling people into the remaining paths. Open
spaces are organized into sections with specific uses, degrees of visibility, and
more or less restricted access.

Figure 4: Water as an obstacle. Map of the Quartier DaimlerChrysler at Potsdamer Platz in

Berlin (© Lars Frers)

Other ways to channel moving people into certain directions are bottlenecks.
Entry gates at airport terminals, the gangway that leads to an entrance into the
ferry’s hull, and doors and portals in general necessitate that people collect
and move through a small, easily observable and controllable opening. Often,
this passage causes a reduction in speed, because the bottleneck will only al-
low a small number of people to pass through at a time—in situations where
people want to flee from a place, these bottlenecks can become deadly traps;
at other times, they might become mere annoyances. The stairways leading
down to tracks in railway stations like those in Darmstadt and Berlin are
overcrowded when commuter trains arrive and people spill out of the train,
wanting to get home as quickly as possible. For frail people these situations
can be dangerous; they might not be able to keep up with the crowd, forcing
them to wait until the crowd has passed. In addition, the chance of coming
into physical contact with others increases. Those that have to carry bulky
items might become the target of unfriendly remarks or even shoving. In
times of increased traffic, bottlenecks can produce hierarchies that center

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around physical power, recklessness, and male chauvinism—however, they

are also places where beneficial social exchanges can take place, ranging from
helping each other out to flirting and being explicitly polite.
The combination of obstacles, open spaces, and bottlenecks organizes
places in a way that steers people along paths, keeping them out of certain
areas, moving them past shops and advertisements, and allowing them to stay
for an extended period of time in certain places. The order that is produced in
this way is stable, because the spatial setup is not easily rearranged, and it is
subtle, not becoming the center of attention or reflection, instead being taken
as a granted feature of everyday routines. However, the spatial arrangement
may also produce conflict when it does not accommodate the needs of people
or when it creates opportunities for potentially risky contact that could be
evaded under other circumstances.

No i s e — a t m o s p h e r e

Often, conflicts are heard before they are perceived with any of the other
senses. Shouting or loud noise makes heads turn and gazes look around. The
acoustical setup and local activities of a place determine how easily raised
voices can be heard and how far a provocation or a cry for help carries. But
there is much more to the acoustics of a place; it has a deep impact on the
feeling or mood of the setting into which one is entering. Loud noise, espe-
cially industrial or shrill noise, or a mix of complex and different noises is
stressful and creates a sense of chaos and irritation.

Figure 5: Organs and shouting. Main Hall, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, September 2004
(Photo: © Lars Frers)

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The still frame (Figure 5) offers a glimpse of a setting that irritated me when I
encountered it. I recorded it during an arrival in Leipzig. As I left the train, I
heard loud sounds that I couldn’t immediately recognize. After a brief mo-
ment, my perception shifted and I realized that I was listening to music,
probably barrel organs. Leaving the platform and walking up to the main hall
of the station, I quickly realized that a throng of people was gathered around a
group of barrel organ players who where playing their organs in synchrony,
creating a loud and, at least for me, quite unusual musical experience. I
quickly readied my digital camcorder and started recording the events.
The loud, hand barrel orchestra music combined with the general back-
ground noises of the train station in a confusing mixture that made it neces-
sary for me to reorient myself and spend some effort in the interpretation of
the situation at hand. However, as soon as I had made up my mind about what
was going on, I was able to make use of the situation for my research. Others
made use of this situation in different ways. As can be seen in the figure
above, some people are standing around the ensemble in a loose semi-circle,
watching the band and listening to the music. In the center of the figure, one
might be able to discern two kids, who were dancing to the music. Many were
just walking by—or being pushed by on a wheelchair by a member of the
Bahnhofsmission (a Christian welfare organization for railway stations). Oth-
ers changed their route and passed through on the other side of the hall, where
no throng was making the passage difficult. The adolescents that are on the
far left of the still frame, walking further leftwards, took this setting as an op-
portunity for a contrasting activity. While they were approaching the scene,
one member of the group started to raise and shake his fist in time with the
rhythm of the music. A few steps later the frontmost boy, who is carrying a
bag over his shoulder, picked up on the characteristic of the setting itself: the
music. He started to bawl to the rhythm. His shouting was acknowledged by
visible consternation in the case of some of the bystanders and musicians, and
grinning faces in the case of fellow members of his peer group. As I demon-
strated with this example, music in this particular setting is used as an oppor-
tunity for more or less active entertainment and as an opportunity for provoca-
tion and the conflict-laden challenging of norms.
There are other aspects of the acoustic setup that frequently caused per-
ceivable readjustments of people in the setting. One feature was particularly
prominent in terminals during the less-dense traffic of evenings and during
the night. People, both men and women, turned their heads or shifted their
gaze when they heard the sound of footsteps, specifically the sound produced
by women walking with high-heeled shoes. Most railway stations have stone
or marble floors; this kind of floor material, when located in buildings with
long halls and very few sound-absorbing surfaces, produces sounds that carry
over long distances. Women with high heels adjust their behavior, taking par-
ticular care not to risk eye contact with strangers or appearing confused and

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disoriented—a brisk pace is best suited for this environment during a time
when few people are present. The spectators are made aware of the arriving
business-like person early, they can study him or her, look some other way,
start talking about the person or even hollering something in his or her direc-
tion. The combination of soundscape, usage pattern, and outfit produces spe-
cific vulnerabilities and makes social hierarchies audible—both gender and
class hierarchies, which in this particular case often run cross to each other.

Figure 6: Relative calm. Color Line Terminal, Oslo, December 2004

(Photo: © Lars Frers)

Soundscapes have a significant impact on the mood of a setting. People in the

Western world have experiences with the implementation of sound in shops
and warehouses. Depending on clientele, product, and season, music is played
that supposedly improves sales and binds customers to a particular chain or
brand. In terminals, the playing of music is not part of the usual setup. This
does not mean that sound cannot participate in the creation of an atmosphere
that fits the experience of traveling. In the case of the Color Line Terminal in
Oslo, captured in the photo above, the low roof, which is tiled with pin-holed
panels that muffle sound to a certain degree, helps to create a feeling of calm
and orderliness that fits the rest of the setting: comfortable chairs, many
benches with thick upholstery, plants, and models of Color Line’s ships—
sound, noise, music; all these are important participants in the creation of at-
mospheres (cf. Böhme 1995) that can be anywhere on the spectrum from calm
to overstimulating to chaotic and even to outright aggressive.

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Bo d y — c o m f o r t a n d s u f f e r i n g

The comfortable upholstery in the ferry terminal makes it easier to use the
waiting time for relaxation, idle chatter, or just watching others do the same
until boarding time begins. During the last minutes before the gangway be-
comes accessible and the boarding gates are opened, the boarding area of the
terminal rapidly fills with people, and many will leave their seats to join the
queue. Those that remain seated—either because they do not want to squeeze
themselves in with the rest or because extended periods of standing or slow
shuffling are not convenient for them—will often be literally faced with a
wall of human bodies that is thickening more and more before it starts seeping
away through the boarding gates.

Figure 7: Edges. Railing in front of the Casino and Musical Theater. Marlene-Dietrich-
Platz Berlin, May 2001 (Photo: © Lars Frers)

When an extended period of time is being spent in a single place, either in a

ferry terminal lobby, in a waiting booth at a railway station, or in some other
publicly accessible place, the need for some kind of seating or bodily support

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LARS FRERS

grows steadily. In the case of the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz (Figure 7), this may
become a serious problem. As can be seen on the map in Figure 4, the Platz
has characteristics of a dead end. When people arrive, they tend to slow down,
look around, and finally stop. A decision has to be made: should I stay or
should I go now? Staying will be trouble. There are no benches or “official”
resting facilities at all. What about commonly used substitutes? The architec-
ture here does not include stone slabs on which one could sit. There are stairs,
though. The Marlene-Dietrich-Platz itself is lowered into the ground a bit,
slightly reminiscent of an amphitheater. However, there is a significant differ-
ence from the steps of an amphitheater: the height of the steps is only about
ten centimeters (four inches). Sitting on these steps is like sitting on the floor,
making it an invalid option except for people who are fit enough and do not
care about the stigma that is associated with sitting on the ground, i.e. adoles-
cents and some younger adults.
One other option remains and is used by those who cannot or will not sit
on the ground: the railing that runs along part of the water channels in front of
the musical theater. Several times I observed elderly people, who were wait-
ing for others at the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz, looking out for a spot where they
could rest. Not finding anything suitable, they would lean against the railings
visible in the figure. In one case an elderly women, after leaning on the railing
for almost ten minutes, finally tried to squeeze herself into the railing to sit on
the lower bar. However, sitting on either of the bars causes pain too. The bars
are wide enough to offer some support, but they have sharp edges that quickly
begin to hamper circulation and cause discomfort.5 Spending more than a few
minutes in this place is a problematic occupation.
Most people will quickly leave this place, those that remain will have to
manage their corporality in a way that allows them either to ignore their
physical discomfort and remain standing somewhere, or that allows them to
ignore potential stigmatization as loiterers who sit on the ground.

Space and materiality—normalization

Regarding the evidence that I have presented about the Marlene-Dietrich-

Platz, it can be argued that it is on the one hand a place that is secured and
pacified by its design, exposing deviant behavior and preventing certain move-
ments and activities. The behavior that establishes itself as normal is one of
passing through, looking at the unusual architecture, and perhaps spending
money in one of the local entertainment or food-consumption facilities. What

5 As I noticed recently, the situation got even worse: the water channels behind the
railing now contain fountains that spray the railing with water, making it practi-
cally impossible to sit on them.

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 PACIFICATION BY DESIGN

struck me as particularly interesting about this place is the fact that there is
almost no visible presence of security personnel—very much opposed to the
interior of the nearby Sony Center on the other side of the Neue Potsdamer
Straße. The design of the Sony Center includes many corners, benches, and a
fountain around which people gather to watch and talk. In this place, security
personnel are patrolling regularly and openly. I would argue that the design of
the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz makes this kind of policing mostly unnecessary.
This does not mean that police or security personnel is not available—its visi-
ble presence is just not needed to establish a specific kind of self-controlled
normality at this place: one of passing through, of consumption, of a tourists’
place with unusual architecture and entertainment facilities. This orderly nor-
mality is based on the reduction of risk: encounters are brief and visible to
everyone, extended stays are made difficult.
On the other hand, the design of this place produces a certain degree of
uneasiness, discomfort, or even physical suffering for the people that want to
use this place. A similar statement could be made about the halls and waiting
facilities in train stations. The acoustic setup makes disturbances perceivable
over long distances, this helps in securing the place to a certain degree, while
at the same time this design could also make people more vulnerable and un-
easy. Other places, like the lobby in the ferry terminal, or even the somewhat
covered, lower part of the waiting booth, allow for a higher degree of relaxa-
tion. In both of these cases, hired staff is present and helping to keep up an
orderly normality. Hired staff does not necessarily mean security personnel—
other employees, in particular the members of the cleaning personnel, play an
important part in the production of sanitary design. Places that offer hidea-
ways that are somewhat shielded from sight and hearing make it possible to
engage in other activities, be they as harmless as loitering or flirting, or ex-
tending into the realms of the criminal and unlawful.
One could say, therefore, that design can produce specific, highly con-
trolled normalities that are based on spatial and material constellations in
which principles of visibility or perceivability in general are governing. How-
ever, this kind of pacification by design has at least two limitations. First, this
kind of design does not prohibit conflict and provocation per se. As has been
demonstrated in the example of the adolescents who challenge the normality
of the barrel organ entertainment setting, the design can also be a resource for
the open display of deviance. Second, this kind of pacification by design also
produces specific feelings of uneasiness, making it harder for some people to
use these places, and causes specific vulnerabilities. The Marlene-Dietrich-
Platz can make you feel uneasy, watched, and insecure about what you should
actually do there; the non-existence of seats and benches and the unwieldy
design of similar objects like stairs and railings can make it hard for frail peo-
ple to spend time in a place, and the display of people can also make them

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LARS FRERS

vulnerable to harassment, especially if they belong to “weaker” groups like

women, or to (ethnic) minorities.
The design of places, the spatial arrangement of walls, obstacles, and
other objects, the channeling of people through a place, the opacity of barri-
ers, the texture of surfaces, the acoustics of a place, and other features that did
not fit into this text, like the micro-climate, the olfactory circumstances, and
electro-magnetic design (wireless networks, radio, mobile phone networks
etc.), all participate in the production of local normalities. These normalities
are not completely stable and rigid, they may be challenged. Accordingly, I
define these normalities as dynamic constellations. These constellations, how-
ever, contain spatio-material components that are of a greater stability and
persistence than many social and situative ones. Temporary, even regularly
occurring disturbances can happen, but the constellation quickly returns to the
previous, stable setting.

Re f e r e n c e s

Böhme, Gernot (1995) Atmosphäre. Essays Zur Neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt am

Main: Suhrkamp.
Dingxin, Zhao (1998) “Ecologies of Social Movements. Student Mobilization
during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing”. American Journal of
Sociology 103/6, pp. 1493–1529.
Garfinkel, Harold (1984/1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Malden/MA:
Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing.
Goffman, Erving (1971) Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Or-
der, New York: Basic Books.
Lefèbvre, Henri (1991/1974) The Production of Space, Oxford/UK, Malden/
MA: Blackwell.
Lofland, Lyn H. (1998) The Public Realm. Exploring the City’s Quintessen-
tial Social Territory, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962/1945) Phenomenology of Perception, Lon-
don/New York: Routledge & K. Paul Humanities Press.
Radlbeck, Karl (1981) Bahnhof und Empfangsgebäude. Die Entwicklung vom
Haus zum Verkehrswegekreuz, Dissertation, Technische Universität Mün-
chen.
Zukin, Sharon (1995) The Cultures of Cities, Oxford/UK, Cambridge/MA:
Blackwell.

260
Violen c e P re vent ion in a
South Afric an Town ship

KOSTA MATHÉY

South Africa’s townships count amongst the places with the highest indices
for violence and crime worldwide. The causes for this are complex and spe-
cific to the place; therefore attempts towards violence reduction necessarily
need to be multi-dimensional, too. The paper describes the suggested ap-
proach for a German cooperation project for Khayelitsha Township near
Cape Town. The project has recently started in the field.1

Increasing presence of violence has become a major concern in most big cities
of the South. However, the actual threat still differs enormously from one
country to another. Southern Africa belongs to the places of worst reputation,
and within the country, and even within each city, the extent of violence can
vary considerably. One rather remarkable example is Cape Town, where one
may find some white bourgeois quarters where the fear of violence certainly
is present—to tell by all the visible alarm and “armed response” signs outside
of the houses—even if that fear might not be supported by police reports from
that area. But then there are the townships, some of which present frightening
violence statistics. Take Khayelitsha, with almost half a million inhabitants it
is the biggest township of Cape Town, where two German cooperation pro-

1 This article is based upon the feasibility study for the German-South African
Financial Cooperation project “Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading”
that the author prepared as team leader of AHT International for the Kreditanstalt
für Wiederaufbau (KfW) and the City of Cape Town. Co-authors of the quoted
sections of the report are Ivan Jonker, Sean Tait, Jasmin Nordien, Einhard
Schmidt-Kallert, and Nina Corsten.

261
KOSTA MATHÉY

jects are currently attempting to reduce urban violence.2 In 2002 figures, the
recorded yearly homicide rate for young black males amounted to 300 deaths
per 100,000 inhabitants (almost one per day), whereas the national average
was 48. In just one month (June 2002) there were more than 300 assaults re-
ported to the police, 109 burglaries, almost 100 cases of robbery, 33 attemp-
ted murders, and 29 cases of rape. When interpreting these figures, one must
keep in mind that (apart from murder, which is difficult to hide) only a frac-
tion of violent incidents are reported to the police; realistic figures are esti-
mated to be up to five times higher.
In order to reduce violence it is necessary to distinguish between different
forms in which violence typically occurs in a particular place. This will help
to understand its causes and circumstances, which is necessary to grab the evil
by its roots. In Khayelitsha, these forms can be identified as follows.

Economic violence

Burglary and robbery are the most predominant incidents of economic vio-
lence in Khayelitsha. The prime targets of this type of violence are busi-
nesspeople, many of whom have already left the neighbourhood in fear of their
lives. Though vibrant, the informal economy in Khayelitsha has limited infra-
structure and is vulnerable to crime and robbery: there are only two banks and
three ATMs in Khayelitsha, which makes people who earn or receive money
easy prey for robbery, including old-age pensioners who often get assaulted
after collecting their monthly pension. The other most vulnerable group are
normal residents, whose belongings at home get stolen when nobody is home,
or are robbed when only a woman or children are present. Particularly in the
informal settlements, the makeshift houses cannot be securely locked.
According to police statistics, the level of economic violence has been ris-
ing since 1995; this has been connected to increasing poverty levels. While
certain sectors of the Khayelitsha community are becoming more affluent,
others nurse disappointed hopes of unfulfilled aspirations after the end of
Apartheid. Also, the very poor conviction and punishment rates in the crimi-
nal justice system have been blamed for the increase: criminals have a sense
of impunity, as the consequences of their activities will not be dire.

2 Urban Conflict Management Peace and Development Project (PDG) supported

by the German Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit ([Link]
de/weltweit/afrika/suedafrika/[Link]) and “Violence Reduction through Urban
Upgrading” by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau ([Link]
bank. de /DE_Home/Laender_und_Projekte/).

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 VIOLENCE PREVENTION IN A SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP

Shebeen violence and substance abuse

Shebeens are informal taverns and are a very typical feature in townships.
They belong to the most developed informal economic activities and have
also generated the most violence in the community. Estimates suggest that
there are approximately 1,500 shebeens in Khayelitsha, 200 of which are con-
sidered problematic. Shebeens are practically the only places where residents
can meet or congregate and socialize in the dull township environment. Peo-
ple can dance, play billiards, and meet the members of the opposite sex with-
out needing a pretext, opportunities that are almost unavoidably linked to the
consumption of alcohol. But the lack of regulation of shebeens and taverns
also intensifies social conflict, as there is no uniform closing time at night and
loud juke box music is played until late at night without consideration for
neighbours.
Most of the shebeen customers are youths from 12 years upwards. The
landlords, known as Shebeen Kings and Queens, often start their businesses
as a survival strategy, since only little investment is needed. Nonetheless,
many of the shebeen landlords can generate some capital quite quickly, espe-
cially if they get involved in the business of marketing information and stolen
goods.
The shebeens are considered to be the primary source of conflict and vio-
lence in Khayelitsha. There are many assaults that happen late at night when
people leave the shebeens: Men rape women or go home drunk and abuse
their partners. The police also believe in a strong link between shebeens and
murder. The alcohol/drug and crime nexus is widely acknowledged. Statisti-
cal information notes a convincing correlation between the use of alcohol and
drugs and crime. Fifty-five percent of unnatural deaths in Cape Town in 1998
involved people who had blood-alcohol concentrations greater than 0.08g/
100ml, with the highest levels recorded in homicide-related deaths. Between
67 % and 76 % of domestic violence cases are alcohol-related. There is also a
noted link between alcohol abuse and child abuse, with drinking parents more
inclined to become negligent and abusive (Parry 2000).

Domestic violence

In a place where violence in public is part of everyday life, one is not sur-
prised to discover that violence occurs just as much in the private sphere,
namely, at home or in families where women and children experience abuse
(Fisher et al. 2000). Women interviewed in Khayelitsha defined their experi-
ences of violence against them in the following categories; economic, emo-
tional, physical, and sexual abuse (Nedcor 1999). Alcohol abuse (mostly by

263
KOSTA MATHÉY

men) results in women being battered weekend after weekend, as well as an

increase in child abuse and incidences of rape.3
In a social climate of rapid urbanisation and enforced modernisation, pov-
erty and stress often rule domestic life, and traditional forms of male-female
division of labour prove to be incompatible with the modern reality of income
earning: At least in parts of Khayelitsha, the majority of the households are
headed by women. Other households have a female wage earner, while the
husband is unemployed. Nevertheless, the man usually considers his wife as
being fully in charge of children and household in addition to her job. About
80 % of the domestic violence cases reported are stirred up by disputes over
the household budget.
Unlike public places, where individuals are protected—at least in the-
ory—against violence, a victim at home finds it even more difficult to find
assistance. Where maltreatment at home is evident, the police are often reluc-
tant to take up the case and prefer not to interfere in “matrimonial matters,” as
they call it. During interviews some women indicated that the absence of suit-
able mechanisms of policing and justice has often meant that “the most dan-
gerous place for them is at home.” The discrepancy between incidents of do-
mestic violence and reported cases remains high for various reasons, in par-
ticular, because the women have no alternative places to go after reporting to
the police, and women are also often afraid to lose their only wage earner if
the man has a job. Even sexual abuse of children by their fathers over long
periods of time is not seldom ignored by the mothers.

Gender-related violence

Gender-related violence in Khayelitsha includes various kinds of domestic

violence, rape, indecent assault, and abuse of children and women, occasion-
ally also of men, and neglect of children. Tensions and conflict between men
and women are an integral part of life. In most cases, women and children
become victims in one way or another. Sometimes they are physically ham-
pered for life, sometimes also severely injured and infected with HIV; fre-
quently, they are killed. In some cases, women and children live in a climate
of extreme insecurity, with more reasons to be afraid than men.
A social study on Khayelitsha4 revealed that two-thirds of interviewed
women consider rape, violence, and abuse against women and children as ma-
jor concerns, whilst the males prioritised theft and assault, drug trafficking,
and political intolerance as major problems. According to data collected by
assistant institutions, there is an average of three rape cases every day. Need-

3 Khayelitsha Development Project Summit, 2002.

4 Taylor study in Khayelitsha, Khayelitsha Development Project Summit, 2002.

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 VIOLENCE PREVENTION IN A SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP

less to say, especially for rape, only a tiny fraction of victims ever report the
incidence to any institution at all. Children are frequently raped because of the
myth that sex with a virgin is a cure for HIV infection.
Over six percent of known cases are gang rapes. When cases are reported,
the case tends to be withdrawn by the victim at a later stage because of fears
of revenge, or possibly even being beaten to death. Between ten and twenty
percent of the victimised women are already HIV-positive. Around half the
rape victims are between 14 and 19 years old.5 The main time during which
women and girls are attacked is the early evening or the night; about half the
cases reported happen outside. Some places seem to be particularly prone, and
residents sometimes try to make these places less dangerous, for example by
cutting bushes and other greenery in publicly accessible areas.

School violence

Violence at schools has recently become a worrying issue in two respects.

Firstly, secondary school pupils increasingly carry knives and even firearms
at school, where they intimidate other children and staff. Theft or robbery of
valuables, such as cell phones, and rape are frequent. Gang fights across school
yards, while more common in certain other townships, are by no means un-
known in Khayelitsha. Secondly, marketable goods such as computers, furni-
ture, sanitary equipment, etc. may get stolen during break-ins.

Road and transport violence, gangs

Transportation generates a multitude of violence in Khayelitsha. There are

conflicts between (minibus-) taxi associations, which flare up regularly: the
taxi associations are in conflict with the buses, and commuters get caught in
the crossfire of these conflicts, or are the victims of crime. Taxis were out-
lawed until deregulation in 1987. The taxi violence peaked in 1993, ceased in
1994, but has steadily been increasing since then. It is interesting to note that
since 1997, injuries have not increased as much as deaths, suggesting that kill-
ings are becoming more focused and accurate.
Khayelitsha commuters who use public transport are incredibly vulnerable
to crime and violence, as workers commute daily for approximately two hours
—leaving home in the early hours of the morning and arriving home late at
night. They travel using public transportation that is increasingly unsafe and
unreliable. Buses are overcrowded, especially during peak hours, and taxis are

5 The rape of children under fourteen is not included in these figures.

265
KOSTA MATHÉY

not roadworthy. For example, it is a common sight to see a taxi without wind-
screen wipers on rainy days.6 Taxi drivers have been reported to extort sexual
services from women passengers who cannot pay their fare. According to the
South African Police Service, buses in Khayelitsha have become prime tar-
gets for robbery. Most robberies and assaults reported occur en route to and/or
at transportation junctions where people converge to commute to work, as
they are carrying cash in order to pay for transport services. This risk can also
be related to certain environmental factors:
• The lighting is poor, and commuters start travelling from as early as 4:00
a.m., when it is dark.
• There are some railway stations with no roads leading to the station, hence
commuters have to walk between shacks or across bushy fields to get the
station, making them vulnerable to being attacked.
• The buses, taxis, and trains are overcrowded.

Use of firearms

Gun violence is rife in Khayelitsha. Armed robbery tops the list of most-
feared property crimes for residents. Serious crime such as murder, attempted
murder, and aggravated robbery accounted for 42 % of crimes reported in
2001.7 Death by firearm is listed as the second most common single cause of
death (8.5 %) in Khayelitsha.8 Gun violence is also highlighted as one of the
biggest threats facing youth in the area today, both as offenders as well as vic-
tims.9 As such, it impacts heavily on the social and economic lives of resi-
dents, and especially those of shopkeepers and street vendors–the entrepren-
eurs, and the self-employed, who tend to become the victims of shootings
more than any other group. In addition, transport stations are particularly vul-
nerable to gun violence, being points of concentrated economic activity that
become targets for crime. Clinics are robbed at gunpoint to access medicines
which subsequently are resold to needy patients.
A key explanatory factor in armed violence is, in the first place, the ample
availability of guns in the community. It is easy even for minors to buy such a
weapon. One of the most important sources of illegal weapons is stolen legal
fire arms, especially those stolen from the local police.10

6 Khaylitsha Development Project Summit, 2002.

7 SAPS, 2002. Statistics for Khayelitsha 1995 to 2001.
8 Khayelitsha Health Summit 2002.
9 Khayelitsha Violence Prevention through Urban Renewal Focus Group meeting
6 July 2002.
10 A practice not unusual was reported at the evaluation forum, whereby policemen
on duty are offered free spirits at shebeens, and this, when they are drunk, makes
it easy to grab their pistols.

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 VIOLENCE PREVENTION IN A SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP

Fear of violence

It is not surprising that exposure to high levels of violent crime directly,

through common acquaintances and through the media, has an impact on resi-
dents’ fear of crime. The Cape Town victim survey noted that there was little
difference in fear of crime between people who had been victims of crime and
those who had not personally suffered crime. Fear of crime was highest at
night, when both victims and non-victims felt unsafe. Fear of crime and feel-
ings of insecurity add considerably to the stress and tensions of life. This in
turn impacts on productivity, with negative implications for the economy, and
general feelings of well-being—eventually impacting political and social sta-
bility. In a survey conducted in Khayelitsha in 200211 , the residents identified
crime as their major concern and, in particular, referred to robbery, burglary,
and gangsterism. Fifty-eight percent of all respondents said that they felt very
unsafe in their homes, and 34 % felt very unsafe while walking in their neigh-
bourhood areas during the day.12
An important factor contributing to the feeling of insecurity derives from
the deficiencies of the social justice system. Considering the size of Khayelit-
sha, the assigned police compliment of 270 members (in 2002) is negligible,
especially as this figure includes 50 % civilian and support staff. Allowing for
shifts and leave, only less than 50 policemen are on duty at any one time. Fur-
thermore, the shift patterns do not coincide with crime patterns: over the vio-
lent peak periods after hours and on weekends, the station is often depleted of
personnel. The deplorable shortage of vehicles is further exacerbated by the
absence of a driver’s licenses among police staff. This situation implies that
there are very remote chances that police will be able to interfere when and
where violence occurs—or at least to secure evidence once it has happened.
As a result, it is estimated that only a very few of all crimes are reported to the
police and suspects are eventually arrested in only less than 25 % cases. Once
in court, the conviction rate is around 75 %—less than 10 % of all the commit-
ted crimes. For certain types of crime the rate is even lower: For armed rob-
bery, common assault, attempted murder, and theft between 80 % and 100 % of
cases were also closed as undetected. Since only a fraction of cases taken to
court lead to a conviction, conviction rates may drop as low as one percent!

11 Micro Cosmos Survey supervised by the author as part of the KfW feasibility
study “Violence prevention through Urban Upgrading” in Khayelitsha.
12 While 74 % felt very unsafe while walking during the night.

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KOSTA MATHÉY

An integrated approach towards violence reduction

As outlined above, high levels of violence in Khayelitsha occur in many dif-

ferent sectors, including different forms of economic violence, domestic and
gender violence, social violence, transport violence, etc.13 The causes of vio-
lence are highly complex and interlinked. To be effective, any attempt to re-
duce overall levels of violence in such a setting must take this into account.
The analytical tool known as the “Triangle of Violence” (cf. Liebermann/
Landmann 2000 and Kruger/Landmann/Liebermann 2001) can be helpful for
developing suitable strategies for action. This tool refers to different factors
that are always present in an act of violence and therefore imply the need to
react on different fronts at a time: they must be directed towards discouraging
a potential violator (offender), supporting the victim of violence, and to ar-
range the environment in a way suitable to reduce the opportunity for crime to
happen. The following diagram illustrates the triangle for the example of rape:

Figure 1: Triangle of Violence: Example ‘Rape’ © Kosta Mathéy

In other words: the triangle concept illustrates the need for an integrated pro-
gramme to address violence in Khayelitsha, or any other township—and it
leads to alternative options different from the “zero tolerance” approach a-
dopted in certain other countries.
Considering the size of Khayelitsha, with its almost half a million inhabi-
tants, a choice must be made about the geographic concentration of any inter-
vention, since an equal spread of necessarily limited assistance over the entire
township would not mean more than a drop in the ocean and have little per-
ceivable impact. On the other hand, a limitation on only a few “hot spots”

13 Fortunately, gang and political violence are less prominent, but have been seen
in the past and may show up again.

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 VIOLENCE PREVENTION IN A SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP

would probably not lead to the desired effect of violence reduction, but rather
to the displacement of the same crimes to surrounding areas. Therefore, the
definition of core zones of integrated action—including, for example, polic-
ing, infrastructure improvement, service provision, job creation measures,
with a wider ring of “softer” measures, seems to be an adequate response to
the given situation.
In the case of the Khayelitsha upgrading project, as it was conceived in
the KfW feasibility study, this conclusion was the result of participatory
analysis in the course of a “consultation forum” that drew together many dif-
ferent stakeholders, including a majority of residents apart from business peo-
ple, local politicians and administration, the police, and NGOs. The same fo-
rum also gave an assessment on the most pressing security concerns, which
should guide an anti-violence intervention:
• High vulnerability through the absence of police protection in cases of
need, and conviction rates close to zero.
• Additional vulnerability through the need for long walks at awkward times
because of the absence of facilities needed close to homes on a daily basis
and due to a poorly functioning public transport system.
• Desperate material needs as a consequence of extremely high unemploy-
ment, poor education, and an alarmingly bad state of health.

Keeping this in mind, and referring to the above-mentioned need to concen-

trate interventions in a few selected locations, the “Safe Nodes” concept was
formulated, which promises to have the best multiple impact on the complex
causes and circumstantial nexus. This approach was equipped with two addi-
tional elements: a Social Development Fund and supporting complementary
activities, as will be explained in the following section. A vector-impact prog-
nosis shows how all three elements directly or indirectly contribute to the dif-
ferent predominant forms of violence in Khayelitsha.

The “Safe Nodes“ concept

A “safe node” can be defined as a small urban sub-centre, principally catering

to the residents living within easy walking distance, bringing together a com-
bination of commercial, service, and work opportunities presently missing in
the neighbourhood. Its contribution to the aim of violence prevention is a-
chieved through:
• Proximity to a protective institutional policing body that will deter poten-
tial violators and criminals, and increase security for both shop and service
operators and the public in general. With this improvement, business peo-

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KOSTA MATHÉY

ple will thus flock to the centre rather than move out of Khayelitsha,
which is happening at present.
• Better access to public transport, as each node will be supplied with bus
stops and a taxi rank. The concentration of customers in these sub-centres
will automatically imply a more readily available transport service.
• The availability of essential services to the residents within the neighbour-
hood will avoid the need for long walks through partially vacant land and
thus reduce the exposure to risk of violence, especially assaults and rape.
• Additional local labour and education opportunities will contribute to
better incomes and ultimately effect a drop in economic violence.

A safe node could be arranged around an open space, like a village square.
This “place” would very soon become a social centre, and would be used, for
example, for open-air public meetings and the popular music rallies that seem
to occur especially on Sundays. In some densely built-up areas, a generous
“Pedestrian Avenue” might be a more practical alternative to the square, and
thereby create a “sense of place” in this otherwise very densely housed envi-
ronment. Conversations with residents have also shown a surprising prepar-
edness by many of them to give up their plots if needed for the benefit and
general good of the community. For this reason a partial clearance and pro-
posed relocation of some dwellings to the second-floor level of any new
development or into overspill areas is a possibility when vacant land is not
available for rehousing.
In greater detail, a safe node would offer the following facilities, of which
the first three correspond to the three concerns in the “triangle” concept, and
thus directly address violence, whereas the remainder indirectly contribute to
lessen violence in the township:

• Security through better policing

The need for physical protection through some kind of policing has been
explained, but obviously it will not be possible to place a police station in
every neighbourhood. Therefore the installation of other institutions that
can offer refuge, protection, and can at least enable contact to the police is
an essential asset of the safe node. In the case of Khayelitsha, such institu-
tions could be, for example, offices for the PDP14 or the city police,15 a fire

14 The Peace and Development Project (PDP) was started in 1997 in the townships
of Crossroads and Nyanga with the support of the GTZ. Its central elements are
patrols of voluntary and unarmed peace workers recruited from the same neigh-
bourhood, who also receive training and thus improve their job opportunities af-
ter this service.
15 The city police supplement the National Police Service and mostly look after
traffic issues.

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brigade, the Neighbourhood Watch,16 or a Community Corrections Of-

fice.17
• Victim Support
It has been criticised that the current policing and criminal justice system
pays more (if not all) attention to the violator/offender than to the victim.
Progressive anti-violence policies need to correct this, and one way of achiev-
ing it is through the provision of “Victim Support Centres.” Different expres-
sions of violence cause a variety of individual needs and call for a larger
number of specialized support centres. Equally needed are “safe houses,”
which can offer refuge for battered/ raped women and children. There are
NGOs that operate in this field but lack the necessary facilities and accom-
modations. In general, such institutions may receive financial support from
the Province, among other donors.
• Safer environment
Acts of violence are facilitated in certain types of environment, or may be
discouraged through certain design principles for a “safer city.” Examples in-
clude the provision of better street lighting, possibly a CCTV system (if con-
nection to a central monitoring station and quick response in cases of emer-
gency can be assured), good visibility, refuge and alarm systems, etc. Seg-
ments of the safe node, such as a courtyard, can be gated with metal detectors
and transformed into gun-free zones. It must be emphasized, however, that
the environment is one of many contributing factors. The notion of “design-
ing out crime” cannot be considered a realistic perspective.
• Decentralised service facilities
In order to reduce travelling need, those services required by the citizens on a
day-to-day basis, such as a post office, cash-withdrawal and payment facili-
ties, a surgery or clinic, information and counselling services, a library and
internet access point, coin-operated laundromats, etc. should exist within
walking distance from home and will be included in the safe node. Minority
group-oriented installations, like pre-schools, old age homes, and special-
needs schools should be considered wherever the subsequent operation of the
same can be assured—interviews with relevant NGOs in Cape Town indicate
a realistic perspective to attract more services of that kind in Khayelitsha. A
very demanding need has appeared over the last years in catering for the
AIDS orphans, who may exceed 100,000 within less than ten years. This ur-
gent and complex problem will be dealt with in a different paper.18

16 Neighbourhood watches consist of specially trained and accredited civilians who

act in extension of the national police SAPS.
17 Community correction offers assistance to reintegration of convicted law offend-
ers as an alternative to imprisonment.
18 Research project on housing needs of AIDS orphans in South Africa at
PAT/Technical University Darmstadt, cf. [Link].

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KOSTA MATHÉY

• Neighbourhood training and income opportunities

Whilst there apparently is an over-supply of primary and secondary
schools (although not always of the desired standard) in Khayelitsha, op-
portunities for professional training and adult education are rare. As up-to-
date skills are essential for any income-earning job, education is the best
possible investment. Both NGOs and businesses provide a number of
courses already, but the lack of suitable accommodations creates a bottle-
neck for extending the service. Adult classrooms and offices for continu-
ous education should therefore be part of the accommodations provided in
node development. Equipment and computers could be provided via dona-
tions.
Direct income-earning opportunities will be created through a small mar-
ket with lockable stalls, in order to provide a safer and more comfortable
operational base to the vulnerable street vendors. Workshop space for rent
will be provided for artisans and small industries, as there is a proven de-
mand for it. Commercial retail shops would be included in the nodes as
well, and the resulting rent income at market price could cross-subsidise
social facilities, which, by definition, cannot be run on a profit-making ba-
sis.
• Leisure facilities
Presently, shebeens are about the only available venues where residents
can socialise in the township, but they have also been identified as a major
factor in the spread of crime and violence, especially for adolescents. Spe-
cial efforts are therefore needed towards the provision of alternative and
competitive leisure facilities. Multi-functional youth clubs would be the
first choice, apart from video-cinemas, licensed taverns and coffee shops,
community halls, sports facilities, etc.
• Replacement dwellings
Some parts of the township, which are older and offer better transport,
may get quite crowded and do not contain empty land needed for creating
a safe node. Therefore it may be necessary to clear a piece of land and to
relocate a limited number of existing dwellings. The upper floors of a safe
node can accommodate such replacement units and simultaneously inhibit
a desertion of the node at night.

Community cohesion through a

S o c i a l De v e l o p m e n t F u n d

The creation of an island situation where violence is kept under control im-
plies a serious risk that violence will just move out of the areas into to the
immediate neighbourhoods. Therefore the neighbouring environment of a safe

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node and its residents needs to be included in the programme. Ample partici-
pation of the population is essential, but experience shows that this can only
be achieved and sustained over a longer period if the residents have some
power over decision making. The Social Development Fund is a very good in-
strument to reach this goal: The fund will be at the exclusive disposal of a
neighbourhood and may be invested for the benefit of the community accord-
ing to its own preferences. The target group may choose from a menu of typi-
cal investments, or can elaborate their own proposals. A better value from the
allocated budget may be obtained through self-help inputs.

Self-organisation is required for the operation of these parochial projects, and

this will help to stimulate and build up a strong and supportive community
that is better prepared to put a stop to violence. Furthermore, it will foster the
growth of collective self-esteem among the residents, and teach them the
skills needed to obtain subsequent funding for community needs from third-
party sources. Investments to be provided basically fall into three categories,
namely technical infrastructure, measures directed towards a safer environ-
ment, and income generation:

• Technical infrastructure
Townships were originally planned by the Apartheid government and
commonly contain basic infrastructure. Allocation of residence was con-
trolled by the authorities. However, with the fall of the Apartheid regime
also came the freedom of residence, and may people arrived in the town-
ships from the countryside and from the homelands. Many of them settled
on the plots of friends and family, or squatted on empty land in and around
the townships.
The existing infrastructure could cope with the unplanned population in-
crease, and the squatter areas still lack most basic facilities such as wa-
ter, sanitation, footpaths, and storm water drainage. The Social Develop-
ment Fund can provide for an economic infrastructure in the eligible set-
tlements, like shallow sewer systems (10 % of normal cost), plastic piping
for water connections, additional bucket-system toilets, and street lighting.
• Safer environment
The environment can be improved and made safer through community ef-
forts. Examples include playgrounds to keep children off the streets, peace
gardens, safer pedestrian walkways and road crossings, the relocation of
shebeens, and establishing an address system for the easy location of
homes by police or other authorities.

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KOSTA MATHÉY

• Income generation and education

Provisions from the Fund can be invested directly in community-based in-
come producing projects, like urban farming, or a waste recycling scheme.
Neighbourhood-based pre-schools or other educational initiatives could
receive special training. Cultural identity workshops and courses or a local
history room could be funded. Special attention may be paid to arts and
music projects (e.g. “township jazz”), as these provide a real opportunity
for black, low-income residents to enter the national and even interna-
tional stage.

Logistical support and complementary activities

“Invisible” development efforts, many of them logistical or educational, are at

least as important as “hard” physical investments that can be visited and pho-
tographed. In this context, “Supporting Activities” may be defined as soft pro-
ject elements that are essential for the safe nodes and the Development Fund
to function, but also peace building, conflict management, and assistance to
community self-administration would fall into this category, even if they
could be directed towards the whole township of Khayelitsha, and not only to
the residents living close to a secure node. Examples for Supporting Activi-
ties, as they were already identified in participatory workshops, include:
• Civil peace-building workshops dealing especially with female victims of
violence and with conflict management.
• Awareness-raising campaigns on domestic rights and facilities for family
conflict resolution.
• Conflict management and development programmes to avoid possible out-
breaks of violence.
• Introductory civil rights training for members of Community Safety Fo-
rums.
• Training and internal administration support for Street Committees.
• Staff training for (especially informal) pre-schools.
• Training for KDF/KDT organs and delegates in preparation of safe node
administration.
• Teacher training in adult education and preparation for self-employment
and market-related skills in support of provided facilities.
• Training of staff for advice and counselling facilities to be provided.
• “Trusty taxi driver” and “Recognized shebeen” programmes.
• Housing design and finance management for replacement housing.
• Participatory design for community open space and housing.
• Cultural roots development (arts, collective memory, and history).

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Part of the success of an improvement and development programme lies in the

capability to detect and facilitate synergies with existing activities and possible
projects by other stakeholders and development agencies—which is the role of
urban management and governance. Particularly when considering the com-
plexity of violence-prevention issues, complementary efforts should be well-
coordinated and synchronised in order to produce a visible outcome and thus
maintain the support of residents. After all, what was repeatedly criticised both
by the population and by the experts is the lack of coordination of efforts by the
municipality and private and voluntary stakeholders in their recent develop-
ment efforts. Typical fields in which those complementary activities might be
placed include:19
• Improvements to the criminal justice system.
• Improvements to the youth justice system.
• Technical infrastructure provision.
• Management support for infrastructure.
• Environmental improvements.
• Social Services (initiation camps, orphans hospices, old age homes, ceme-
teries).
• Business and job creation.
• Support to the projected Central Business District.
• Improvement of the transportation system.

From theory to practice

The Feasibility Study for a possible German Cooperation Project, on which this
paper is based, has been prepared for the German Bank for Reconstruction and
Development in 2002. The contract for the execution of the project was finally
signed in 2005, and implementation will hopefully start in the same year. In the
meantime, some circumstances have changed. Most staff and community lead-
ers, who cooperated in the initial project formulation, have changed jobs and
may have moved elsewhere. The business situation seem to have improved af-
ter the construction of a number of supermarkets, which does not necessarily
create much employment, but improves shopping facilities and reduces the dis-
tance that residents have to walk carrying either money or goods. But violence
remains a central concern, like elsewhere in South Africa—this is why another
upgrading project with a focus on violence prevention with KfW support is al-
ready in the conception phase in Buffalo City, in the Eastern Cape Province.20

19 The Feasibility Study prepared for the KfW project recommended some 130
complementary projects and identified adequate third-party funding for most of
them.
20 Another research project on urban violence in Southern Africa has been formu-
lated at the PAR institute, Darmstadt University ([Link]).

275
KOSTA MATHÉY

Re f e r e n c e s

Dugard, Jackie (2001) “From Low Intensity War to Mafia War: Taxi violence
in South Africa (1987–2000)”. Violence and Transition Series 4. CSVR.
Fisher et al. (2000) Working with Conflict: Skills and Strategies for Action,
London: ZED Books.
Kruger, Tinus/Landmann, Karina/Liebermann, Susan (2001) A Manual for
Crime Prevention through Planning and Design, Pretoria: SCIR.
Liebermann, Susan/Landmann, Karina (2000) A Manual for Community
Based Crime Prevention, Pretoria: CSIR/National Crime Prevention Cen-
tre.
Nedcor ISS (1999) Vol. 3– May to June.
Parry, CDH (2000) Alcohol Abuse and Crime in the Western Cape, Cape
Town: SA Medical Research Council.

276
Homel and/T arget :
Cities and the “W ar on Ter ro r”

STEPHEN GRAHAM

Programmes of organized, political violence have always been legitimized

and sustained through complex imaginative geographies. This chapter dem-
onstrates that the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” rests fundamentally
on such dialectical constructions of (particularly urban) place. The essay ar-
gues that the discursive construction of the “war on terror” since September
11th 2001 has been deeply marked by attempts to rework imaginative geog-
raphies separating the urban places of the US “homeland” and those Arab
cities purported to be the sources of “terrorist” threats against US national
interests.1

Introduction

Programmes of organised, political violence are always sustained through

imaginations of place and of geography. Whilst the places of the “homeland,”
which are purportedly defended tend to be sentimentalised and romanticised
within such imaginations, those of the purported “enemy” are often simulta-
neously dehumanised and demonised. Crucially, such imaginative construc-
tions of the “home” places, or territory to be protected, and the enemy places
to be assaulted and turned into military targets, are therefore always manufac-
tured together. The highly charged attachment to the homeland places works
in parallel with calls to violence against a demonised, “foreign” place. Both of
these constructions, moreover, often rest on homogenous imaginations of the

1 Some material in this chapter draws on an article published in the International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2006).

277
STEPHEN GRAHAM

two communities. Any sense that home or enemy places are actually diverse
and made up of many diasporic, ethnic, and political groups tends to be lost in
the recourse to absolute ideas of what is good, what is evil, and who is the
righteous victim.
In what follows, I seek to demonstrate that George Bush’s “war on terror”
rests centrally on such a parallel sentimentalisation of US cities and the de-
monisation of Arab ones. In particular, the “war on terror” rests centrally on
Bush’s “with us or against us” rhetoric, which pits the “turf” and “homeland”
of the continental US—spaces of intrinsic “freedom” to be “secured”—
against the demonised and dehumanised cities of the Middle East. These are
cast as intrinsically evil or barbarian places, labyrinthine and structureless
cities that are, essentially, “nests” of terrorism to be assaulted and cleansed in
order to save Freedom. Because of the inseparability of the imagination of
homeland and target places in the “war on terror,” it is inadequate to address
the programme of “homeland security” or the US invasions of Iraq and Af-
ghanistan in separation. Rather, the way places are represented within both
these programmes needs to be looked at together.
This contribution does just this. It explores the two sides of place con-
struction in the war on terror in an integrated way. On the one hand, then, an
analysis is undertaken of the way in which the cities of the US homeland are,
post 9/11, being represented as intensely vulnerable places requiring massive
state effort at “homeland security.” On the other, attention turns to the way in
which the cities of Iraq are being widely represented by US politicians, US
military commentators, the media, and in popular cultural spaces, as little but
“nests of terrorism” to be assaulted through massive US military fire power.
As Edward Said’s (1978) book, Orientalism, demonstrated, this two-sided
construction of places is the latest in a centuries-old story. Ever since the
dawn of Western colonial power, Arab cities have been represented by West-
ern powers as dark, exotic, labyrinthine places that need to be “unveiled” for
the production of “order” through the superior scientific and military tech-
nologies of the occupying West.
The Bush Administration’s language of moral absolutism is, in particular,
deeply Orientalist. It works by separating “the civilised world“—the “home-
land” cities that must be “defended“—from the “dark forces,” the “axis of
evil,” and the “terrorists nests” of Islamic cities, which are alleged to sustain
the “evildoers” who threaten the health, prosperity, and democracy of the
whole of the “free” world. The result of such geographical imaginations is an
ahistorical and deeply Orientalist projection of Arab civilization that is very
easily worked to recycle what Said called, just before his death, “the same
unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations to stir up ‘America’ against the
foreign devil” (Said, 2003: vi).

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Discourses of “terrorism” are crucially important in sustaining such bi-

naried notions of place, and the highly different values accorded to human
lives in each zone that result. Central here is the principle of the absolute eter-
nality of the “terrorist”—the inviolable inhumanity and shadowy, monster-
like status of those deemed to be actual or dormant “terrorists,” or those sym-
pathetic to them. The unbound diffusion of terrorist labeling within the rheto-
ric of the “war on terror,” moreover, works to allow virtually any political
opposition to the sovereign power of the US and its allies to be condemned as
“terrorist” or addressed through emergency “anti-terrorist” legislation.
Protagonists of such opposition are thus dehumanized, demonized, and, above
all, delegitimised.

Securitising “homeland” cities

The first element in the geographical imaginations that fuel the “war on ter-
ror” is an appeal by the Bush Administration to “securitise” the everyday ur-
ban spaces and infrastructures of the US “homeland.” This is paralleled with
endless cycles of manufactured fear, from the famous colour-coded warnings
of the risk of terrorist threats, to a wide range of political adverts and media
outputs carefully describing what a “dirty bomb” or vials or “anthrax” could
do to a major US city. Paradoxically, the programme for “homeland security”
relies, then, on the manufacture and endless extension of pervasive feelings of
insecurity.
Here, endless discussions of “security” emphasize a virtually infinite range
of threats from a limitless range of people, places, and technologies—all to
justify a massive process of state building. The basic spaces and systems of
everyday life in US cities—airport immigration points, the Internet, the postal
system, subway and train networks, the electricity grid, street grids, public
spaces, the water systems—are portrayed as geographical or technological
borders through which a potentially threatening “Other” might leap at any
time or place. Vast efforts are being made by US political, military, and media
elites, in particular, to spread what Jonathon Raban (2004: 3) recently called a
“generalized promiscuous anxiety through the American populace, a sense of
imminent but inexact catastrophe” lurking just beneath the surface of normal,
technologised, (sub)urbanised, everyday life in the US.
This reimagining of “homeland” cities involves four related areas of work.
First, a massive process of “re-bordering” is underway. This has involved a
reimagination of the nature of US civil society as a bounded, national space
whose flows and connections elsewhere—of people, information, commodi-
ties, and money—can be demarcated, surveilled, and carefully filtered. Most
obviously, this involves the militarisation of national borders, the insistence of

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biometric passports for all nations who have a visa waiver agreement with the
US, and the installation of a wide range of “smart” sniffing and detection de-
vices through the technological fabric of US cities. Radiation sniffers now
straddle the entrances to container ports. Anthrax detectors inhabit the innards
of the postal system. New York police officers carry portable devices for de-
tecting “dirty bombs”. And so on. Jonathan Raban captures the palpable trans-
formation of US urban landscapes well. “To live in America now,” he writes:

at least to live in a port city like Seattle – is to be surrounded by the machinery and rhetoric of
covert war, in which everyone must be treated as a potential enemy until they can prove them-
selves a friend. Surveillance and security devices are everywhere: the spreading epidemic of
razor wire, the warnings in public libraries that the FBI can demand to know what books
you’re borrowing, the Humvee laden with troops in combat fatigues, the Coast Guard gun
boats patrolling the bay, the pat-down searches and X-ray machines, the nondescript grey
boxes equipped with radar antennae, that are meant to sniff pathogens in the air (2004: 4).

Second, major crackdowns have occurred on diasporic social groups deemed

potentially to harbour, or provide sympathy to, terrorist groups. Arab-
American communities, in particular, have faced the brunt of this escalation
of state incarceration, profiling, and repression as McCarthyist obsessions
with the “enemy within” have been Orientalised on the post 9/11 world. Tell-
ingly, the largest Arab-American community in the US, the Detroit suburb of
Dearborn, was the first city district to receive a local departmental office of
Homeland Security.
In most mainstream US media discussions, such places have been por-
trayed unerringly as zones of threat. They are represented as homes to people
who, whilst being US citizens, must, inevitably, be loyal to the “terrorists”
who, as we shall see shortly, are judged by many neo-conservative commen-
tators to be the sole inhabitants of the enemy zone (Middle Eastern cities like
Fallujah). Consequently, “Arab” and “American” are widely portrayed as an-
tithetical adjectives in the mainstream US media since 9/11.
Third, a broader chill on dissent has been notable in post-9/11 USA, as
anyone deemed to be insufficiently patriotic within the escalating militaristic
fervour has been increasingly vulnerable to accusations that they, too, have
sympathy with “terrorists.” Notable here has been the [Link] cam-
paign, where Middle Eastern scholars across the US who have been espousing
the work of Said or other postcolonial scholars have been publicly “exposed”
and students attending their sessions have been urged to denounce their pro-
fessors in class.
Finally, the very language of “homeland security” invoked by the new
state apparatus has played a vital role. Crucially, it has worked to problema-
tise the sorts of cosmopolitan and diasporic mixing which is now the domi-
nant feature of most US cities. This language, which uses “folksy” words like
“turf,” as well as the endless use of the word “homeland” itself, is intrinsically

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anti-cosmopolitan, anti-urban, and anti-immigrant. Paul Gilroy (2003: 274)

recently argued that the widespread invocation by the Bush Administration,
following Samuel Huntingdon, of the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” neces-
sarily “requires that cosmopolitan consciousness is ridiculed” in the pro-
nouncements of the US state and the mainstream media.
This geographical reimagination of the US “homeland,” in a world of in-
tensifying connection, mobility, and porosity, means that a sort of homogene-
ous community within US cities of authentic, patriotic US citizens is being
suggested. Such an imagination undermines the legitimacy of large swathes of
the social fabric of the nation. First Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security Secre-
tary, for example, has widely argued that, post-9/11, “the only turf is the turf
we stand on.” This suggests that the US nation is a singular, almost ruralised
and domestic community that is tied closely to the “turf” of the land.
This geographically fixed imaginary, with its strong borders separating
the US “turf” from the outside world, contrasts starkly with the language of
previous generations of US politicians who widely celebrated the boundless
sense of mobility, possibility, immigration, and assimilation within US nation
building. As Amy Kaplan (2003) has argued, the reality of an urban, multi-
ethnic USA, with many competing turfs and multiple points of view—a real-
ity which was, ironically, demonstrated by the large number of nationalities
represented on the lists of dead on September 11th 2001—is therefore denied.
Instead, the language and programme of “homeland security” hints that a pri-
vileged, singular community exists of those settled and authentic US social
groups whose deep connections with their “turf” mean that they can be relied
upon to be sufficiently patriotic.
The positions of more recent waves of immigrants, meanwhile—especially
“illegal” ones—become dramatically more perilous. This is especially so as
such groups have been widely linked in the media with “terrorist” groups,
allowing many of their members have been incarcerated, both within the US
and in the extra-territorial “camp” at Guanttánamo Bay, without trial and with
the possibility of remaining in captivity until death. As with the civilians of
Iraq and Afghanistan who have died in the wars, then, the reimagining of the
geography of the US “homeland” has played a crucial role of stripping de-
monised groups of both life chances and even the right to life.

Co n s t r u c t i n g Ar a b c i t i e s a s m i l i t a r y t a r g e t s

Inseparable from such reimaginations of the geographies of the US national

space, a many-stranded effort has been underway since 9/11 to portray certain
Middle Eastern cities as intrinsically barbarian and terroristic spaces. This has
been necessary to legitimise their assault by massive US fire power, allegedly

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to protect the “freedom” of the sentimentalised places of the US homeland.

These two parallel discourses have worked powerfully to establish the abso-
lute separation of the “us” and the “them,” a separation that allowed the huge
violence against the everyday spaces of Iraq and Afghanistan to be legiti-
mised.
This invocation of assaults of demonised places to protect the places of
the “homeland,” of course, is actually a very large part of the story of the le-
gitimisation of the assault on Iraq. The WMD attack on European and US cit-
ies within 45 minutes is a crucial example here. But the pronouncements of
Bush and Blair are only the tip of the iceberg here. Much less discussed, but
perhaps more powerful still, have been the way in which Iraqi and Afghani
cities have been portrayed as little but targets for ordnance within a wide
range of media, military, and computer-game environments. It is worth ex-
ploring a few examples of how this has been done.
First, the voyeuristic consumption by Western publics of the US urban
bombing campaigns, which have been such a dominant feature of the “war on
terror,” is itself based on representations where cities are actually constructed
as little more than receiving points for the dropping of murderous weaponry.
Vertical web and newspaper maps, in particular, have routinely displayed cit-
ies like Baghdad as little more than a collection of impact points where GPS-
targeted bombs and missiles are either envisaged to land, or have landed, are
grouped along flat, cartographic surfaces viewed as if from space (Gregory
2004a). Meanwhile, the weapons’ actual impacts on the everyday life for the
tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis or Afghanis who are caught up in the
bombing, as “collateral damage,” have been both marginalised and violently
repressed by the US military. Most famously, this has involved the bombing
of Al-Jazeera transmission facilities because they transmitted images of the
dead civilians that resulted from the bombing. As Derek Gregory (2004b) has
argued, in these representations, Arab “cities” are thus reduced to the “places
and people you are about to bomb, to targets, to letters on a map or co-
ordinates on a visual display.”
Strikingly, the failure even to count the 100,000 or so dead Iraqi civilians
that had resulted, by December 2004, from the war’s bombing campaigns and
urban battles (Roberts et al. 2004), reveals that the civilians of targeted cities
are “cast out” so that they warrant no legal status or visual presence. In stark
contrast to the inviolable lives lost on 9/11, because they are deemed to in-
habit intrinsically “terrorist” places, their sacrifice can go largely unremarked;
their bloody deaths can go blindly unrepresented.
Second, such casting out of the lives and suffering of ordinary civilians is
legitimized and obscured in the “war on terror” by a wider discourse in which
entire cities of such victims are portrayed as little more than “factories” or
“nests” sustaining “terrorists” and “extremists.” To achieve this, huge efforts

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are being made by both the US military and the mainstream US media to con-
struct Islamic cities as dehumanized “terror cities”—nest-like environments
whose very geography undermines the high-tech, orbital mastery of US
forces. For example, as a major battle raged there in April 2004 in which over
600 Iraqi civilians died, General Richard Myers, Chair of the US Joint Chiefs
of Staff, labeled the whole of Fallujah a dehumanized “rat’s nest” or “hornet’s
nest” of “terrorist resistance” against US occupation that needed to be “dealt
with” (quoted by [Link]).
In the bloody urban battles of 2004 for Saddam City, Fallujah, and Najaf,
the promulgations of the US military forces fighting in Iraq—and their leaders
back in the US proper—have also routinely blended Islamophobic racism and
crude Orientalism. Again, this worked continually to reinforce the perception
that these cities are little but “nests” of terrorist violence that necessitate tar-
geting by superior US surveillance technologies and military firepower which
will somehow act to “cleanse” or redeem the intrinsically terroristic urban
places of Iraq. “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,”
boasted one US Marine to the New Statesman in April 2003.
Widespread pronouncements of the fighting US soldiers themselves illus-
trate these geographical imaginaries all too clearly. US Marine snipers, after
the battle of Fallujah, for example, talked exultantly about their “kills” of
“rag-heads” and “sand niggers” in Fallujah (Davis 2004). Shocked senior
British officers in Iraq—whose forces are far from blameless in terms of bru-
tality against Iraqi civilians—even alleged (anonymously) that American
forces often viewed Iraqi civilians as Untermenschen (the Nazis’ word for
subhuman). This view, of course, has been reinforced by the extending list of
prison torture scandals that have erupted since the end of the 2003.
Added to these street-level discourses, a large group of professional “ur-
ban warfare” commentators, writing regular columns in US newspapers, have
routinely projected deeply racist notions implying that the inhabitants of tar-
geted Iraqi cities are merely subhuman pests requiring extermination. An im-
portant example comes from the highly influential “urban warfare” commen-
tator, Ralph Peters, writing in the neo-conservative New York Post.
To Peters and many like him, cities like Fallujah and Najaf are little more
than killing zones that challenge the US military to harness its techno-
scientific might to sustain hegemony. This must be done, he argues, by killing
“terrorists” as rapidly and efficiently—and with as few US casualties—as
possible. During the battle of Fallujah, Peters labeled the entire City a “terror-
city” in his column. Praising the US Marines “for hammering the terrorists
into the dirt” in the battle, he nevertheless castigated the cease-fire negotia-
tions that, he argued, had allowed those “terrorists” left alive to melt back into
the civilian population (2004a).

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In a later New York Post article, Peters (2004b) concluded that a military,
technological solution was available to US forces that would enable them to
“win” such battles more conclusively in the future: killing faster, before any
international media coverage is possible. “This is the new reality of combat,”
he wrote. “Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and ter-
rorist refuge to which our troops have to go in the future.” Arguing that the
presence of “global media” meant that “a bonanza of terrorists and insur-
gents” were allowed to “escape” US forces in Fallujah, US forces, he argued
“have to speed the kill.” By “accelerating urban combat” to “fight within the
‘media cycle’ before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can
twist the facts and portray us as the villains,” new technologies were needed,
Peters suggested. This was so that “our enemies are overwhelmed and de-
stroyed before hostile cameras can defeat us. If we do not learn to kill very,
very swiftly, we will continue to lose slowly.” It is arguments like Peters’ that
have been central in constructing Fallujah as the crucial, symbolic space of
resistance within the whole Iraqi insurgency. Such a symbolism has made the
destruction of resistance in Fallujah a central objective of US forces.
Third, the construction of Arab cities as targets for US military firepower
now sustains a large industry of computer gaming and simulation. Such simu-
lations—which are created especially to create positive images for the US
military amongst younger computer game users—propel the player into the
world of the gaming industry’s latest obsession: modern urban warfare. They
work to further reinforce imaginary geographies equating Islamic cities with
“terrorism” and US military intervention.
Such games serve to further blur the boundaries separating war from en-
tertainment. Worse still, they demonstrate that the entertainment industry is
actively collaborating in constructing a culture of permanent war. Within such
games, Arab cities are represented merely as environments for participants to
enter in search of animalised “terrorists” to kill repeatedly (without blood or
screams). When people are represented, they are the shadowy, subhuman,
racialised figures of absolutely external “terrorists” to be annihilated repeat-
edly in sanitized “action” as entertainment or military training (or both). An-
drew Deck (2004), writing on the website No Quarter, argues that the prolif-
eration of urban warfare games based on actual, ongoing, US military inter-
ventions in Arab cities, works to “call forth a cult of ultra-patriotic xeno-
phobes whose greatest joy is to destroy, regardless of how racist, imperialis-
tic, and flimsy the rationale” for the simulated battle.
These representations, of course, resonate strongly with the pronounce-
ments of military urban warfare specialists in the wider media like those of
Ralph Peters discussed above. They also blur with increasing seamlessness
into news reports about the actual Iraq war. Kuma Reality Games, for exam-
ple, which has actually sponsored Fox News’ coverage of the “war on terror”

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in the US, uses this sponsorship to promote an urban combat game. In their
words, this centres on US Marines fighting “militant followers of radical Shi-
ite cleric Muqtaqa al-Sadr in the filthy urban slum that is Sadr city.”
The US Army—which now brands itself as “the world’s premier land
force”—itself works hard and at many levels to demonize Arab urbanism per
se through the medium of video games. In fact, it is now one of the world’s
biggest developers of video games, which it now deliberately deploys as aids
to training and recreation amongst US soldiers and the generation of both re-
cruits and revenue.
The US Army now gives urban warfare computer games such as Amer-
ica’s Army—with its simulations of “counter terror” warfare in densely
packed Islamic cities in the fictional country of “Zekistan“—free to millions
over the Internet as an aid to recruitment. America’s Army has been followed
up by the even more elaborate game, Full Spectrum Warrior, another ex-
military training video game in which US forces again wage urban warfare in
simulations of Middle Eastern cities, whilst this time dispensing racist and
Islamophobic expletives. Even some video game reviewers have criticised the
racism of the game. One reviewer on the GamingAge website argued that
“this game would have been fine without the tawdry 4 letter words and nega-
tive racist remarks” from the simulated US soldiers. Such racist remarks have
done little to inhibit the game’s popularity, however. Writing in a chat room
on the neo-conservative [Link], one reviewer of the game gushes
that, “given the current state of the world, it’s amazingly relevant, not to men-
tion fun to fire on raghead terrorist wanna-be’s.”
Finally, to parallel such virtual, voyeuristic, “Othering” of Arab cities, US
and Western military forces have constructed their own simulations of Islamic
cities as targets—this time in physical space. A chain of 80 mock “Islamic”
urban districts have been built across the world since 9/11 designed purely to
hone the skills of US forces in fighting and killing in “urbanized terrain.”
Taking 18 months to construct, these simulated “cities” are then endlessly
destroyed and remade in practice assaults that hone the US forces for the “real
thing” in sieges such as those in Fallujah.
Replete with minarets, pyrotechnic systems, loop-tapes with calls to
prayer, donkeys, hired “civilians” in Islamic dress wandering through narrow
streets, and olfactory machines to create the smell of rotting corpses, this
shadow urban system simulates not the complex cultural, social, or physical
realities of real Middle Eastern urbanism. Rather, it reflects the imaginative
geographies of the military and theme park designers that are brought in to
design and construct it.

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Co n c l u s i o n s

This brief essay has shown that Bush’s “war on terror” rests fundamentally on
imaginations of geography which necessarily represent both the cities of the
United States and those of the Middle East in highly charged ways. Given the
highly urbanised nature of both the USA and Iraq, highly contrasting and
symbolically charged representations of cities are the central pivot of such
imaginative geographies. Such geographical imaginations, far from being of
mere academic curiosity, have done, and are doing, massive political and
geopolitical work. Without their widespread acceptance and recycling, and
their incessant symbolic violence, the war on Iraq, simply put, would have
been impossible. Without the flowing of racist and incendiary representations
of Arab urbanism as little more than a domain for the killing of “terrorists” in
a wide swathe of US popular culture, the war could not have been sustained.
And without the careful construction of imagined geographical zones of peace
from those of war, the casting out of civilians who die as “collateral damage,”
or who are thrown into extraterritorial camps with no legal rights—potentially
to the end their days—could not have occurred so effectively.
This is because the successful construction of the geographical imaginar-
ies outlined in this essay has, very literally, worked to demarcate where death
is of consequence and where it is not. It has provided the mental and psychic
guidance for ethical decisions of where human beings have worth and must be
protected and where they do not and can be killed with no recourse to visibil-
ity, ethical dilemma, or risk of illegality. More troubling still, these implicit,
but all-important, distinctions have been routinely re-circulated in the “popu-
lar geopolitical” spaces of entertainment and the voyeuristic consumption of
war.
The ultimately tragedy of the geographical imaginaries that are at the root
of the “war on terror,” however, is that they are almost indistinguishable from
those invoked by Osama Bin Laden. Whilst the homeland and target places
are obviously reversed in Bin Laden’s rhetoric, the geographical imaginaries
invoked by both Bush and Bin Laden are otherwise startlingly and depress-
ingly alike. Both assert the power of righteous victimhood and the inviolate
importance of homeland cities, whilst at the same time projecting a God-
driven violence on the demonised Other—whether it be places or people.
Both invoke homogenous notions of community and deligitimise, or demon-
ise, the cosmopolitan and diasporic mixing in cities that is the very essence of
contemporary social change. Both cast out the dehumanised civilians who
inhabit targeted places, and who die as a result of the called-for violence,
from any legal, ethical, or theological protection. And both benefit from the
inevitable circle of atrocity, or terror and counter-terror, which results.
The challenge, then, is to collectively dismantle both these self-reinforcing
fundamentalisms, along with their associated baggage of hate-filled geo-

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graphical imaginaries, which together work to sustain this dance of death.

Only by achieving this, and by pushing all such fundamentalisms to the luna-
tic fringes where they belong, might the possibility of building up tolerant,
cosmopolitan, and transnational civil societies on our rapidly urbanising
planet realistically emerge.
This is not to romanticise multicultural cities or to see them as panaceas.
Far from it. All such mixing is necessarily ambivalent; hatred, tension, and
misanthropy are inevitably leavened through all such cities. Rather, it is to
stress that such cities are now the norm and to urge that all political and geo-
graphical imaginaries should only be considered legitimate when they take
this as a basic starting point. In today’s world, all calls to homogenous com-
munity, and all geographical imaginations based on them, can do little but end
up being calls to violence.

Re f e r e n c e s

Davis, Mike (2004) “The Pentagon as global slum lord”. TomDispatch:

[Link] 19 April, accessed June 10th.
Deck, Andy (2004) “Demilitarizing the playground”. No Quarter:
[Link]
Gilroy, Paul (2003) “‘Where ignorant armies clash by night’: Homogeneous
community and the planetary aspect”. International Journal of Cultural
Studies 6, pp. 261–276.
Gregory, Derek (2004a) The Colonial Present, Oxford: Blackwell.
Gregory, Derek (2004b), “Who’s responsible? Dangerous geography”. ZNet:
[Link], 3 May, accessed May 10, 2004.
Kaplan, Amy (2003) “Homeland insecurities: Reflections on language and
space”. Radical History Review 85, pp. 82–93.
[Link] (2004) “Fallujah a ‘rat’s nest’“. [Link], 21 April,
accessed 15 June 2004.
Peters, Ralph (2004a) “Getting Iraq right”. New York Post, 29 April,
[Link], accessed 10 June 2004.
Peters, Ralph (2004b) “He who hesitates”. New York Post, 27 April,
[Link], accessed 10 June 2004.
Raban, Jonathan (2004) “Running scared”. The Guardian, 21 July, pp. 3–7.
Roberts, Les/Lafta, Ridyah/Garfield, Richard/Khudhairi, Jamal/Burnham,
Gilbert, (2004) “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Clus-
ter sample survey”. The Lancet 29 October, pp. 1–8.
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Said, Edward (2003) Orientalism, 2003 Edition, London: Penguin.

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T errori sm an d t h e R ig h t t o t h e S ecu re C it y:
Saf et y v s. Se curit y in Publi c Spa ce s

PETER MARCUSE

The threat of terrorism has been manipulated in the United States to achieve
political results that reinforce the established power structure. This has been
done by vastly expanding what is held out to be the threat, substituting false
for legitimate responses, and making the issue one of ontological security
rather than reasonable safety. The result has been a severe limitation on resi-
dents’ right to the city, a limitation particularly visible in restrictions on their
use of public spaces. The threat of terrorism has thus been used to restrict
democracy in cities and across the nation.

The argument

A great deal is at issue in the manipulation of the threat of terrorism in the

United States today. While various abuses of civil liberties and common sense
have been involved in the governmental responses to the threat of terrorism,
the most serious may be the sale of the threat as a threat to existential security,
instead of one threat among others to public safety. The result after 9/11 has
been to reinforce the positions of those in power and to limit further the free-
dom that is at the heart of the right to the city. The current treatment of public
space illustrates the process.

The argument proceeds as follows: The threat of terrorism includes both le-
gitimate and false responses generated by government. The most damaging of
the false responses is the manipulation of the threat to present it as a risk to

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existential security, rather than as a matter of public safety. The distinction

between security and safety is crucial to understanding this situation.
False responses are damaging in three ways: they suppress analysis, in-
quiry, and criticism; they restrict and pervert the uses of public spaces, both
directly limiting political uses and indirectly restricting popular functions.
While the surveillance of public space is only a small part of what converts
the threat of terrorism from an issue of safety to one of insecurity, it is part of
an increasingly omnipresent imposition of awareness of the narrowing of the
scope of the right to the city. But most pervasively, they limit fundamentally
the right to the city, understood as the freedom of individuals to develop their
capacities fully in a society of support and solidarity. Finally, I want to end
with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion about a better way to handle the
matter.

Two preliminary remarks:

The threat of terrorism is of course not unique historically in playing the role
of legitimating existing power relations. Patriotism/chauvinism, at the extreme
going to war; racism; responses to other catastrophes, including national dis-
asters and individual tragedies, such as assassinations; fear of social unrest,
have all been put to similar uses. As this is written, President Bush is calling
for an expenditure of over $9 billion dollars to meet the threat of avian flu;
political commentators see this as a public relations move to relegitimate a
federal government whose standing has been severely damaged by its (failed)
response to hurricane Katrina. But the threat of terrorism is not only the most
current large case of this pattern, it also relies to an unusual degree on the re-
placement of concerns for public safety with a manipulation of causes of exis-
tential insecurity, a point taken up in detail below.
Further: aspects of what is described below as the response to terrorism
seem unique to the United States: orange alerts, a Department of Homeland
Security, and certainly the invasion of Iraq justified as a defense against ter-
rorism. One notices the difference in daily conversations, in media reporting,
in airport security, in reactions to the use of military force: for most Europe-
ans, the risk of terrorism is a small risk and one risk among others, not a per-
vasive concern of government or political discourse.
There are several possible explanations for the difference: cultural ones
that relate to attitudes towards violence; or prejudice against others (although
the United States is a nation of immigrants and tolerance might be more ex-
pected here); racism, although terrorists are not African American or black—
the traditional objects of racist prejudices; a higher level of insecurity in the

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absence of welfare-state guarantees of a respectable safety net.1 Or it may be

that, because the attack on the World Trade Center was the first incursion of
an outside power on the territory of the United States since 1810, while whole
European countries have historically seen multiple invasions, that the response
has been so disproportionate here. Or it may be (the explanation that seems to
me most satisfactory) that in Europe the legitimacy of the state has been, in
different forms, that it serves a welfare function, true of authoritarian as well a
democratic regimes, while in the United States that function has been in seve-
re decline for at least the last decade. Thus extensive state action is not legiti-
mated in the United States, and meets sharp resistance. Yet extensive state
action is required to protect and extend its economic prosperity and internati-
onal power. The portrayal of terrorism as a life-threatening danger can thus
play the role of legitimating extensive government action. Other threats to
public safety, e.g. epidemics or extreme poverty, might require welfare-type
actions which the regime does not desire; hence the threat of terrorism must
be distinguished from these threats, and is made into a threat to “security” of
an over-riding nature, rather than just another threat to safety. Or it may
simply be another example of a complex American exceptionalism.

The legitimacy of the responses to the

threat of terrorism

Security in the face of a declared threat of terrorism dominates much of the

discussion about city life in the United States today, with frequent reference to
the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11). Does the government, and do the
dominant institutions in the United States, give appropriate weight to the threat
of terrorism after 9/11? How are responses to the threat related to the events
of 9/11?
The basic argument of this paper is that a great deal has changed in what
is done purportedly in response to the threat of terrorism since 9/11. I argue
that there have been both legitimate and false responses to the perceived
threat. The impact of the legitimate response is almost trivial, representing
more of a continuation of trends already in place before 9/11 rather than
something new. In contrast, the impact of the false response has been substan-
tial. The false response has used the threat of terrorism as a pretext to bring
about changes that have nothing to do with physical safety or protection
against terrorism, but implement quite unrelated agendas. In New York City,
those agendas have sometimes had to do with changes in real-estate values in

1 I have argued elsewhere that this higher level of social insecurity explains the
United States’ preoccupation with crime generally, as well as with terrorism.
(Marcuse, 2004).

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PETER MARCUSE

lower Manhattan. In general, however, the implicit agenda has been to in-
crease the political control of dissent, to limit debate about some general di-
rection of policies, and to control the use of public space for democratic but
dissident purposes. That implicit agenda has been advanced since 9/11 under
the pretext of the threat of terrorism, not in legitimate response to it. I do not,
however, claim that this political agenda and these limitations on the use of
public space are new or solely related to 9/11; again, the pattern precedes
9/11, although it has intensified since then.

Let me begin by specifying what I mean by legitimate and false responses to

terrorism:

Type of Response Impact Examples

Targeted Directed at grounded Efficient—
responses risks, regardless of costs metal detectors at airports
Legiti- Inefficient—
mate shoe removal at airports
Balanced Attempting to balance Surveillance cameras at
responses risks against economic entries to public build-
and civil rights costs ings; inefficient targeted
responses
Directly repressive Curtailing activities or Ethnic profiling, immi-
responses restricting individual grant restrictions, “No
rights unrelated to terror- Loitering” signs at train
False ism stations, Patriot Act
Manipulated Creating a pervasive Orange alerts, election
climate responses atmosphere of fear about rhetoric, constrained as-
terrorism, substituting semblies, surveillance in
security for public safety public spaces, fortifying/
as the goal bunkering buildings
Table 1: False and legitimate responses to terrorism

Targeted responses are effective responses directed to eliminate grounded

threats of terrorism. The goal of targeted responses is to eliminate essentially
all risk from the targeted threat. Targeted responses share two characteristics:
there is a substantial basis for the belief that the risks at which they are di-
rected are real, and the measures aimed at guarding against those risks use the
minimum resources and cause the minimum disruption needed to achieve
their objectives. Metal detectors at airports fall into this category; other airport
security measures (such as taking off one’s shoes or having dogs sniff passen-
gers or luggage) may be ineffective or inefficient. At the margin, some bal-
ancing (of what?) is also involved; a very complex security measure that re-
duces risk only to a trivial extent may not be appropriate. But the decision as
to what measures are appropriate is, at least in the first instance, a technical
one in which the capabilities of various technologies and the evaluation of

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intelligence information are key, and on which I claim no expertise, even

though some measures in effect today seem, to me, to defy common sense.
Balanced responses take into account the absolute costs of eliminating
grounded threats, and attempt to strike a balance between physical safety and
economic or social cost. The harm that could be done at a crowded subway
station in New York City, for instance, might be great, but the disruption
caused by any serious measure to avoid the risk of that harm would be tre-
mendous. As a result, no action is taken. For example, posting signs that say
“If You See Something, Say Something” in train stations is not likely to
eliminate much risk. Yet the importance of large numbers of people getting to
work without a huge waste of time outbalances the protection that any further
measures might provide against the risks involved.
False responses are actions not reasonably related to the threat of terror-
ism, but put forward as justified by that threat. Some, those that are directly
repressive responses, limit conventional civil rights. They include bans on
demonstrations, or their restriction in manners calculated to limit their effec-
tiveness in gross disproportion to the dangers they might cause; and, in disre-
gard of alternative, less restrictive measures, provisions of the Patriot Act
punishing speech posing no clear and present danger, arrests and incarcera-
tions without the normal protections of due process. Manipulated climate re-
sponses are less directly repressive. They create a climate of fear and insecu-
rity in which normal and peaceful activities that may be critical of existing
policies or practices are inhibited, in which a pervasive awareness of a su-
perordinate power is created. They include yellow, orange, and red alerts; the
stationing of National Guard troops in public spaces, transport facilities, and
important buildings; jersey barriers and bollards around buildings; warning
signs and loudspeaker messages suggesting the dangers of unattended pack-
ages or unusual behavior; the replacement of glass with concrete on the lower
floors of new buildings (up to 20 stories, in the case of the planned “Freedom
Tower” at the World Trade Center site); constantly reiterated references to the
“war against terrorism” in public speeches, news articles, and media presenta-
tions; restricting access to public buildings and public spaces; random searches
of bags and packages, etc. Their effect is to put questioning of dominant state
practices out of bounds, and to produce informal reactions within civil society
that stultify free speech.
Private and public responses to the threat of terrorism thus range from le-
gitimate to false, from balanced to manipulated. The line between them is not
always clear, but the extreme cases are. The stereotyping of what a terrorist
looks like, with all its racial and religious overtones, clearly is a false re-

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sponse, as is stockpiling duct tape as a defense against biological terrorism.2

And, it appears that individuals in suburban communities have been more
likely to alter their habits in response to the threat of terrorism, to be suspi-
cious of strangers, to post police in public spaces and at public events, and to
guard their public buildings than individuals in far-denser urban centers,
where presumably the threat is greater. Thus there is a subjective factor in the
response, and one conditioned by characteristics of class, and likely of race,
of gender, and of age. But our concern here is with the external and public
aspects of the response, rather than variations in the subjective reactions to it.
And there are cross- and counter-currents to the manipulated response. On
the one side, many people object to the intrusive character of many of the ma-
nipulated responses, and some planners and architects have devoted them-
selves to the search for forms that conceal the anti-terror aspects of some
measures: making concrete barriers with flower planters on top, making bol-
lards inconspicuous, finding social uses for extreme setbacks, etc.3 And at
some point people simply ignore the proclaimed threats: subway ridership in
New York City remains the same whatever level of “threat” may be announced
by the authorities. At the same time, other measures are taken solely for the
purpose of giving publicity to the threat, hammering home its dangers: the
stationing of police or National Guard troops at very visible public locations,
where in fact their function is not to be prepared to take action but simply to
raise consciousness of danger, the random search of bags on mass transit, etc.,
are all calculated to manipulate awareness of the threat of terrorism.

Buttressing power: security vs. safety

At the heart of the effectiveness of manipulated responses is a basic shift in

the perspective on the threat of terrorism, a transformation of a threat to pub-
lic safety to a threat to existential security. Thus, the threat of terrorism is pre-
sented as an issue of security rather than of safety, and used politically not
only in the narrow sense of partisan politics but more broadly to justify major
infringements on not only the use of public space, but also the rights to the
city.
So what is the difference between security and safety? And what differ-
ence does it make? There are key differences between threats to safety and to
security:

2 I would go further and argue that the election of George W. Bush was in large
part a result of a false response to the threat of terrorism, but that brings us out-
side the scope of this article.
3 Cf. the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Planning Agency’s guidelines and cita-
tions in Vale ( 2005).

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Existential insecurity
• Long-term unemployment
• Cancer
• Rejection in love

Acceptable unsafety—assessed risks

• Urban life
• Remote risks
• Involuntary risks
• Calculated hope of gain
• Gambling

Both involve risk, not in Beck’s terms. In common usage, insecurity also de-
scribes uncertainty about minor details of everyday life: not knowing direc-
tions is referred to as being insecure when driving—which way to turn at an
intersection, how not to get lost in a strange city—but that might simply be
referred to as unsureness, and is not the concern here. Other examples of the
difference between insecurity and unsafeness can be listed:

Other examples of insecurity

• Homelessness
• Generally uncertainty as to the availability of satisfaction of basic
needs, including food, shelter, health care, old age support, and educa-
tion (cf. Millennium list, UN Declaration of Human Rights)

Less dramatic examples

• Avoiding urban public spaces
• Retreating to gated communities in the suburbs
• Not leaving home after an extended youth
• Wanting to work behind Jersey barriers, fences, gates, and street set-
backs to protect United States buildings
• Wanting to work in a tower with the elimination of windows up to the
height of up to twenty stories. I proposed that Freedom Tower, planned
for the World Trade Center site, be renamed the “high-rise bunker.”

Examples of public actions positively increasing security

• Social security
• Anti-eviction legislation
• Universal free medical care
• An effective FEMA

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PETER MARCUSE

Examples of activities involving safety and risk

• Generally understanding and acceptance of risk
• Jaywalking
• Driving normally
• Living in the city: no one expects to live in the city without risk, risk is
accepted as part of the urban, part of what makes a city a city in the
sense I impute to Lefebvre
• Courtship, perhaps love itself

Examples of unsafe activities

• Driving drunk
• Swimming with an unknown undertow

Examples of public actions increasing safety

• Warning signs
• Often, police presence
• Enforcement of traffic rules
• Some airport security measures (banning knives: yes, removing shoes:
no).

A current example of the difference: In New Orleans, we know that the resi-
dents of low-lying areas were unsafe even before Katrina, but their experi-
ences in the convention center and the Superdome and the mismanagement of
the authorities produced, I would argue, a feeling of insecurity that was quali-
tatively different from the unsafety experienced before the storm.

Let me try a formal definition: Unsafety is the exposure to risk, but involves
the recognition and acceptance of known risks and the decision to accept or
avoid the risk remaining after it has been assessed and voluntarily chosen risk
minimizations have been implemented. It assumes satisfaction that the risk
and benefits of alternative courses of action are understood and taken into
account, with confidence that the course of action decided on is right. Insecu-
rity is existential. It involves doubt about risk, and fear of risk. It does not
measure risk of harm or extent of benefit, but assumes risk is unknowable in its
extent—it cannot be “assessed”—it is unavoidable in occurrence and beyond
human control—there is no alternative to taking the risk and simply attemp-
ting to minimize its adverse consequences. It assumes that the understanding
of risk is uncertain, both in probability and in scope, and involves no confi-
dence that the course of action decided on is right, yet maintains that is must
nevertheless be taken.
There is not an absolute division, and many cases are borderline, and there
is certainly a subjective element involved. The responses of different indi-

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viduals to different risks will vary. When the federal government declares an
orange risk for the subways of New York City, the reaction of the New York
City Police Department to put police very visibly, and with much publicity,
on many (but a minority of) cars is calculated to increase insecurity, and will
be seen by some as a reason to avoid the subway—but the overwhelming ma-
jority of New Yorkers will continue to use it. As indeed did the majority of
train riders in Madrid and Underground riders in London—seeing the threat
of further terrorism as simply another question of safety, assessing the risk,
and riding.
The distinction between security and safety is key to understanding the
true impact of the current manipulation of the threat of terrorism. Let me re-
turn to that argument.

The threat of terrorism as imposing insecurity

I argue, then, that the responses to terrorism of the character I have outlined
earlier produce, and are manipulated to produce, an atmosphere of insecurity,
one that goes far beyond a concern for public safety. And the threat is pushed
as an issue of security for a specific political purpose: control. In a general
discussion of the politics of fear—I take insecurity to be virtually synony-
mous with his usage—Frank Furedi says: “Today, the objective of the politics
of fear is to gain consensus and to forge a measure of unity around an other-
wise disconnected elite. […] its main effect is to enforce the idea that there is
no alternative.” (The New York Times, 2005).4 No alternative to the continu-
ing maintenance in office of the present administration, and more generally,
no alternative to the continued rule of the existing elite. Furedi speaks of “fear
entrepreneurs” as the actors promoting the politics of fear. In the United
States today, those fear entrepreneurs, those selling insecurity, can be rather
readily identified, and the directly political results of their efforts may be the
key explanation for the victory of George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
In the broader sense, the use of the threat of terrorism to promote a sense
of insecurity, its formulation as an issue of security rather than safety, not
only undergirds a particular political agenda but also limits freedom and re-
stricts the right to the city in general. And we can see this manifest in the way
the threat of terrorism and the insecurity it promotes is used to affect the use
of public space—as in the Republican National Convention case.

4 He is explicit: “The politics of fear is a manipulative project that aims to immo-

bilise public ‘dissent.’”

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Public space as a case in point

City planning is concerned with the physical space of cities. City planners
believe that public spaces should be adequate, open, usable, and accessible to
all. We see public spaces, in a sense, as the symbols of a democratic and open
city. New York City has some great public spaces, including Central Park,
Union Square, and much of the waterfront. The debate over the protests sur-
rounding the Republican National Convention demonstrates that the presence
of physically adequate public space is not enough to achieve that openness,
that democracy, that urban planners want to see in cities. The management
and control of space in the city, as well as its physical aspects, are at stake.
New York has become a city of control; the political authorities, rather than
the people, determine how the city and its public spaces are used. In the con-
trolled city, rights can best be exercised at home, in private, not in public.
The impact of the threat of terrorism on public spaces in cities has been
substantial. Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist intellectual, viewed public
space as representative of the physical nexus of a humane and urban life, as a
form of lived space in which the right to the city could be exercised (cf. Le-
febvre 1996).
Condoleezza Rice has lately taken to quoting the definition of democracy
advanced by Nathan Sharansky: Can an individual say what he or she wishes,
standing in the middle of the largest public square in town, without fear of
arrest or harassment? In this view, which harks back to a view that sees public
space, the agora, the forum, as central to democracy, the openness of pubic
spaces becomes the essence of democracy. It is collective action, not individ-
ual action, communicative action, not self-expression, that is at the core of the
democratic use of public space (cf. Habermas 1984).
I use the phrase “public space” in the lived sense, not in the legal sense.
This view implies a broader conception of public space than a formal, legal
one that looks at ownership as the defining criteria for publicness. I mean
public space in its social sense, space that is lived as open and communica-
tive, seen and felt and treated by most as public, without regard to any par-
ticular form of ownership or physical arrangement.
I am concerned with those spaces that traditionally might be considered
available or suitable for public discussion of common concerns, and specifi-
cally for the expression of political opinions. One might argue that these are
spaces in which the rights to free speech and freedom of assembly under the
United States Constitution are guaranteed.5 The complexities of formal defini-

5 One might thus conceive of six legal forms of ownership of public space: public
ownership, public function, public use (streets); public ownership, public func-
tion, administrative use (city halls); public ownership, private function, private
use (space leased to commercial establishments); private ownership, public func-

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tion and legal interpretation are substantial, but I want to raise the issues of
the use of public space as they affect both city planning and the uses of public
space in cities in the United States today as matters of policy and political
concern, not as legal matters.
The following are classic examples of the kind of public spaces to which I
refer:
• The agora of Athens, as to its (limited range of) citizens6
• The squares of Rome, as that in which Mark Anthony denounced Brutus
in Shakespeare’s play
• The Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in which the mothers of the disap-
peared protested the dictatorship
• The Capital grounds in Washington, D.C. at which Martin Luther King, Jr.
gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech
• The streets of Leipzig where protesters marched and helped precipitate the
events that ultimately led to the downfall of the East German regime
• The streets of Seattle, where protesters raised discussions of globalization
to a new level of awareness
• Most recently, the square in front of Parliament in Kiev, where masses of
people camped to bring down a falsely elected president
• Genoa
• Tiananmen Square
• Prague
• Caracas, in the struggle around Chavez’ presidency.

Not only public space, but also spatial arrangements in general are affected.
The impact of Homeland Security measures on the directly political use of
public space is well known: the restrictions placed on various protest marches
and demonstrations in the nation’s capital, and similar measures elsewhere
around the country, as for instance in limiting demonstrations to cordoned-off
and remote locations at the time of the Republican National Convention in
New York City (Marcuse, 2005). But this type of restriction is only the tip of
the iceberg. What is even more serious is the manipulation of the threat of
terrorism to justify

tion, public use (airports, gated communities, zoning bonus private plazas, com-
munity benefit facilities); private ownership, private function, public use (cafes,
places of public accommodations); private ownership, private use (homes) (cf.
Marcuse, 2003).
6 Slaves were excluded from the discussions. While publicness is rarely absolute
in practice, here it was very limited.

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PETER MARCUSE

• A broad level of surveillance

• Invasions of privacy
• The gathering of information about persons and activities by central gov-
ernmental agencies
• The constant publicity given to the threat of terrorism by government
agencies
• The color-coding of states of danger
• The “If you see something, say something” signs
• The use of security against terrorism as a justification for mammoth budg-
etary expenditures for policing and behavior control measures
• The presence of armed National Guard troops on subways, train stations,
and places of public assembly.

Public space issues are at the center of many responses, and afford direct ex-
amples of the way the false threat of terrorism and the selling of security have
been used to restrict rights to the city:
• Restrictions on the everyday use of public space
• Restrictions on access to public buildings
• Restrictions on political expression and assembly for political purposes
• Restrictions on the freedom of immigrants to use public facilities and serv-
ices in the city
• Promoting flight from the density and diversity of the central city, includ-
ing its public spaces, resulting in
• Increased segregation, exclusion, and concentrated deconcentration of
residences and economic activities
• Restrictions on privacy and freedom from surveillance.

What is the situation in regard to such spaces today in a city like New York
after 9/11? “Securing public space” often means, in Larry Vale’s words, se-
curing space from the public rather than for it. One concluding example may
suffice: the use of the streets of New York City, Union Square, and Central
Park—by anyone’s definition of public spaces—during the recent Republican
Convention.7
There were approximately 400,000 protestors wanting to demonstrate
their objections to the Bush agenda in a public place where they could be
heard. After long negotiations, the organizers of the protest and city officials
finally agreed on a march-route up Seventh Avenue, and a permit was se-
cured. The organizers hoped to end the march with a rally at the Great
Meadow in Central Park, where hundreds of thousands had gathered on pre-
vious occasions for everything from rock concerts to anti-war protests. But

7 I was a participant in the events described below.

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 TERRORISM AND THE RIGHT TO THE SECURE CITY

the City said no, asserting that such a rally would endanger the grass on the
Meadow. Court appeals, perhaps too late—the city strung out the “negotia-
tions” before a lawsuit was filed out skillfully—failed. Ultimately, there was
no rally at all.
As the march proceeded up Seventh Avenue, protesters chanted “Whose
Streets? Our Streets! Whose Streets? Our Streets!” Thousands of voices
claiming their right to the city. This was the people energized, democracy in
action. It felt good, at the time.
But was it really democracy in action? Reflecting on the march, I realized
that what was being demonstrated was precisely that the streets were not
“our” streets, that no “right to the city” had been exercised. The Mayor and
the police could dictate where assembly could take place, how and when and
where and by whom the streets could be used, whether the public parks could
be used for the collective expression of political opinion or not. Whose
streets? City officials’ complete domination over the use of public space in
New York City clarified that these were their streets, not “our” streets—and
there was nothing that could be done about it. Polls showed a substantial ma-
jority of New Yorkers favored allowing a rally on the Great Meadow, but that
did not matter. The message was that parks are for harmless picnics, not pro-
tests.
Yet a democratic use of public spaces requires the ability to organize in
advance, to procure loudspeakers, to erect a platform, to permit collective
communication among large numbers of people. There needs to be a balance
between the use of a city’s parks for recreation and streets for traffic, and their
use for democratic, collective purposes. That balance, however, was tipped far
in the private direction, for the benefit of the attendees at the well-organized
indoor Republican Convention; it did not favor those protesting that conven-
tion outside.
The issues around the use of public space for public purposes, and the ap-
propriate response to the threat of terrorism in regulating their use, are not
confined to New York City or the United States. Around the Reichstag in Ber-
lin is a “Bannmeile,” an officially signposted “mile” of space in which dem-
onstrations are prohibited (cf. Eick 2005). The grounds are clearly public, and
the restriction is enforced supposedly only when parliament is in session. But
in reality, the police determine whether or not the restriction is enforced.
Similarly, in Washington, D.C., arrangements for demonstrations and marches
and assemblies are subject to ever increasing restrictions of time, place, and
manner. Of course legitimate concerns demand a balance between rights of
use and protection against terrorism. But, as New York City’s response to the
Republican National Convention demonstrated, the line between legitimate
balance on the one side and, on the other side, false use to limit the impact of
actions unfavorable to the administration is increasingly suspect. A panel of

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the American Planning Association recently conceded that “[t]he fear of ter-
rorism and the rush to protect against it has made the democracy of public
space a victim” (quoted in Finucan 2005: 5). Good planners are doing what
they can to make the restrictions on public space as inconspicuous and in-
nocuous as possible. Planners, however, are told they must adhere to the
guidelines provided by city officials. Those guidelines, if they come from the
authorities in charge of security, are never open for discussion. Thus, the se-
curity authorities have unilateral authority to determine the balance of uses
and rights.
And these limitations on public use are all legitimated in the name of “se-
curity.” The term “security” has become a catch-all to be defined at the dis-
cretion of the police and the professionals in homeland security. Was anyone
really at risk from terrorism in New York City while the Republican conven-
tion was there? Were the conventioneers, many of whom had not yet arrived,
in any event ensconced within the fortress created around Madison Square
Garden, with access to it and New York’s second largest railroad station
tightly controlled by police, dogs, metal detectors, cameras, helicopters?
Hardly. Was there danger from a few anarchists? Certainly over-kill; there
were not any on the march given to violence, and the extensive intelligence
infiltration of protest groups would have shown that. But the word “security”
has been cut off from its moorings in reality, and instead has become a mantra
that citizens do not even think about questioning. In the controlled city, use is
by permit, not by right. So much for public space.
But the Right to the City has been under siege since before 9/11, and the
false use of the threat of terrorism is only an accentuation of already existing
trends. The use of public authority to control the use of space in the city at the
expense of its residents and the use of power to override the desires and needs
of those with less power have a long history. Robert Moses ran roughshod
over citizen opposition with his highway projects (cf. Caro 1974). Urban re-
newal displaced thousands against their will. Private urban renewal, gentrifi-
cation, is supported by the city’s leadership, despite its adverse impact on
residents. Mega-projects, giant developments internalizing many aspects of
city life (security, shopping, recreation facilities), are supported by the city as
sources of tax revenue, regardless of the impact such projects have on the sur-
rounding communities and the people they displace. The city uses taxes to
subsidize global financial firms that will make the city “competitive,” al-
though such actions may help only a minority of the city’s residents.
In broader terms, the situation is even worse. Not just the use of particular
streets, or parks on particular days, is out of the control of the city’s resi-
dents—city officials also control major changes in the city’s form and struc-
ture, with only the most limited participation by the voters. One of the most
recent examples is the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. The City is using bil-

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lions of dollars allocated to it by the federal government to deal with the con-
sequences of 9/11 to subsidize real estate in lower Manhattan and to build a
“one-seat ride” direct rail link to lower Manhattan from JFK airport. But these
funds would be better directed towards affordable housing, new schools, sub-
way improvements, and job expansion. The majority of the city lives outside
of Manhattan in the outer boroughs; they have crying development needs. If
the matter were put to a vote, the money would likely be spent differently. But
the issue is not put to a vote. Most recently, the state has moved jobs from
state offices in Jamaica, Queens, where the residents had fought hard for in-
vestment, to lower Manhattan. These decisions are not made by the people of
the city.
So, undemocratic political decisions have limited the use of public space,
with the threat of terrorism being only the latest argument for a continuing
narrowing of this aspect of the right to the city.
The ongoing shift from public to private sector control over, and provision
of, “public” space is another piece of the same pattern.8 In part, this is the
simple privatization of existing public space: putting selected commercial
uses in Bryant Park, giving Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) the right
to police public spaces, selling air terminals to private corporations. Greater
quantitative impact, however, is exerted by substituting private space to fulfill
many of the functions of public space: the common areas of private shopping
malls, for instance, have become the “streets” for passage and planned and
random encounters, bookstore cafés have taken over some of the functions of
public libraries, museums become private venues for weddings and fund-
raisers. In each of these cases, restriction on access is in private hands; there is
no right to public use of these spaces.
The manipulation of the false threat of terrorism, one manifestation of
which has been the events surrounding the Republican Convention protests,
are perhaps only the most striking and the most directly political signs of the
retreat from the right to the city. The cordoning off of large sections of central
Washington, D.C. for the inauguration is another sign of this retreat. Even
without massive arrests, the precautions taken in the name of security devalue
the right to use public space in the city.
So, the threat of terrorism is used to limit the political use of public space,
and is legitimated by the artificially induced insecurity that the present form
of responses breeds.

8 Diane Davis of MIT has helped me see this point more clearly.

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Re f e r e n c e s

Caro, Robert A. (1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New
York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Eick, Volker (2001) “Städtische Politik zwischen Bürgergesellschaft und Po-
lizeistaat”. AK – Analyse & Kritik, Zeitung für linke Debatte und Praxis
453/20.
Finucan, Karen (2005) “Security that Works – Beautifully”. Planning Maga-
zine 71/3, pp. 4–5.
Habermas, Jürgen (1984/1981) The Theory of Communicative Action,
McCarthy Boston: Beacon Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (1996/1967) “The Right to the City”. In Eleonore Kofman
and Elizabeth Lebas (eds.) Writings on Cities, London: Blackwell, pp. 63–
184.
Marcuse, Peter (2003) “The Meaning of Public Space”. Conference presenta-
tion, Conference on Public Space, University of Cottbus.
Marcuse, Peter (2004) “Die Manipulation der Kriminalitätsangst: Anti-
terrorismus als Verlagerung der Unsicherheit nach dem 11. September”. In
Sylke Nissen (ed.) Kriminalität und Sicherheitspolitik: Analysen aus Lon-
don, Paris, Berlin, und New York. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp. 89–102.
Marcuse, Peter (2005b) “The ‘Threat of Terrorism’ and the Right to the City”.
Fordham Urban Law Journal XXXIII.
New York Times (2005) October 16, Section 4, p. 3. In [Link]
[Link], October 18, 2005.
Vale, Lawrence (2005) “Securing Public Space”. Typescript.

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Authors

Al-Nammari, Fatima, is an architecture Ph.D. candidate at Texas A&M Uni-

versity. She came to the USA as a Fulbright scholar in 2001. She holds a B.S.
in architectural engineering and an M.A. in archaeology from Jordan and has
broad experience as an architect, faculty member, and historic preservationist.
Berking, Helmuth, is professor of sociology at Darmstadt University of
Technology. His teaching and research areas include social theory, political
sociology, and urban anthropology.
Bhatti, Anil, is professor at the Centre of German Studies and concurrently
dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India. His main areas of interest are comparative literature and
culture studies between Europe and India/Asia.
Bude, Heinz, Dr. phil., sociologist, is the Director of the Research Unit “The
Society of the Federal Republic of Germany” at the Hamburg Institute for
Social Research and has been Professor of Macrosociology at the University
of Kassel since 2000.
De Koning, Anouk, is currently employed as a researcher at the Royal Neth-
erlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden.
She recently completed her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Amsterdam, enti-
tled Global Dreams: Space, Class and Gender in Middle Class Cairo.
Fenster, Tovi, is senior lecturer at the Department of Geography and Human
Environment, Tel Aviv University. She publishes on ethnicity, citizenship,
and gender in planning and development. Her most recent book is The Global
City and the Holy City: Narratives on Knowledge, Planning and Diversity
(2004).

305
AUTHORS

Frank, Sybille, is a sociologist at Darmstadt University of Technology. She

worked at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) and
lectured at the Free University Berlin. Her research areas are globalization,
tourism, heritage industries, and the spatial politics of memory.
Frers, Lars, sociologist at Darmstadt University of Technology, studied at
the universities of Kiel, Bloomington, and Berlin. His academic interests span
urban studies, ethnomethodology, science and technology studies, social the-
ory, and the interactions between space/materiality and human corporality.
Graham, Stephen, is professor of human geography at Durham University in
the UK. He is the co-author of Telecommunications and the City, Splintering
Urbanism (both with Simon Marvin), co-editor of Managing Cities, and edi-
tor of Cybercities Reader and Cities, War and Terrorism.
King, Anthony D., is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Sociology, State
University of New York, Binghamton and lives in the UK. His most recent
book is Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (2004).
With Thomas A. Markus, he is co-editor of Routledge’s Architext series on
architecture and social/cultural theory.
Kong, Lily, is professor of geography at the National University of Singa-
pore. Her research is broadly in social and cultural geography, and covers re-
ligion, national identity, and cultural policy and economy.
Law, Lisa, is a cultural geographer at the University of St Andrews. Her re-
search focuses on the politics of sexual and national identities, especially in
the context of intra-Asian migration. She is currently writing about expatriate
life in Singapore, where she lived and worked before arriving in the UK.
Löw, Martina, is professor at the Institute for Sociology, Darmstadt Univer-
sity of Technology. She has been visiting professor at the TU Berlin and the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris, and visiting fellow at the
IFK, Vienna. Her areas of research are gender studies, sociology of
space/cities, and sociological theory.
Marcuse, Peter, is a lawyer and planner, and professor of urban planning at
Columbia University, New York. Peter has taught in Europe, Australia, Af-
rica, and both Americas. He has written extensively on housing, urban devel-
opment, the history and ethics of planning, racial segregation, and globaliza-
tion.
Mathéy, Kosta, is professor for urban planning and building in non-European
regions at Darmstadt University of Technology. His research fields include
integrated and participatory development, urban ecology, and housing poli-
cies. He directed the feasibility study Violence Reduction through Urban Up-
grading.

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 AUTHORS

Meier, Lars, completed his studies at the universities of Trier and Göttingen
with a diploma in geography and an M.A. in social sciences. Since April 2003
he has been a Ph.D. candidate in the post-graduate college Technology and
Society, and he lectured in sociology at Darmstadt University of Technology.
Ries, Marc, Dr. phil., specializes in media and cultural theory. From 1989
onward he has taught in Austria and Germany, and was professor for com-
parative image theory at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 2000/2001.
His projects and publications are in the fields of mass media, culture, architec-
ture, and art.
Ruhne, Renate, Dr. phil., is a sociologist at Darmstadt University of Tech-
nology. She worked and lectured at the Universities of Bielefeld and Ham-
burg and at Braunschweig University of Technology. Her present research
focuses on the social constructions of space and gender and on prostitution.
Steets, Silke, is a sociologist at Darmstadt University of Technology, and a
member of the artist collective niko.31, Leipzig. She is working on her Ph.D.
project about the production of urban spaces in cultural industries’ networks.
Her research areas are sociology of space, new urban ethnography, and transi-
tional cities.
Stoetzer, Sergej, educationalist, is a research fellow at the Institute for Soci-
ology, Darmstadt University of Technology. He worked at the Institute for
Higher Education Research Wittenberg and studied in Halle and Berlin. His
research areas are sociology of space/place, perception of (urban) space, sur-
veillance and society, and visual methods.
Trubina, Elena, is professor of philosophy at Ural State University, Ekater-
inburg, Russia. She is co-organizing the collective project Diverse Cultures in
Contemporary World, sponsored by the Kennan Institute. Her areas of interest
are social philosophy, urban and art theory, cultural studies, and audience re-
search.
Venn, Couze, is professor of cultural theory at Nottingham Trent University.
His publications include Changing the Subject (1984; 1998), Occidentalism:
Modernity and Subjectivity (2000), and The Postcolonial Challenge (2005).

307