INFRASTRUCTURE, COLONIALISM, AND MILITARY URBANISM

"HOLC is often cited as the originator of mortgage redlining, although, this claim has also been disputed. The racist attitudes and language found in the appraisal sheets and Residential Security Maps created by the HOLC likely gave federal support to existing bias racial antipathy in society at large (Crossney and Bartlet 2005; Crossney and Bartlet 2006)."

On a late afternoon on the 9^th of May 2014 at the Buell Colloquium: The Figure of Democracy: Houses, Housing, and the Polis, Reinhold Martin introduced the keynote speaker, Ira Katznelson, by giving a framework of the recent happenings and concerns in housing in New York City.

I quote him roughly from my notes : “…the Lefebvrian right to the city – simply translates to the right of housing, […] New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New Affordable Housing Policy […] represents an important departure from the status quo, […] so much so, in fact, that the New York Times Editorial Board while applauding the Mayor’s ambition, felt the need to fret a bit over whether all those new units or all those new people who cannot otherwise afford to inhabit our polis might put pressure on the subways and other infrastructures  - shared infrastructures like the Agora formed the backbone of anything like a democratic city – that is a city found on the principle of equality. This preemptive objection shows how far we still have to go. […] There wasn’t really a problem to extending Manhattan’s number 7 subway line to serve the luxurious New Hudson Yards – imagining in pain for new infrastructures to service the city’s dispossessed remains somehow a bit more troublesome.[…] A truly democratic polis cannot be built on such inequality.”

The following day, talks ensued on the question of housing in the U.S. Perhaps the most riveting talks were that of Christina Cogdell author of Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s, who explained how under the slogan of the U.S. Housing Authority “Slums breed crime” poverty-stricken families were gathered and taken to centers to be sterilized instead of being given housing. The following speaker, Ofelia Cueves’s talk was titled: Housing, Race and Imprisonment: Unprojected Futures in American Democracy showed how more recent Domestic Racial Class Policies have deprived non-white Americans from the security of ‘home’ through debt and the denial of mortgage credit.

A few months later, I stumbled upon a book review of Stephen Graham’s Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso Books, 2010). The book review by Jakob Steiner published on August 2013 and titled City Limits: Military Urbanism from Baghdad to Brooklyn explains: “the new military urbanism has permeated how the state imagines urban space: a site of warfare where borders must be constantly shored up against migrants, indigents and criminals.” He further explains what Graham considers as sites of military urbanism “this urbanism expels parts of the homeland as legitimately a ground of war, whether that takes the form of police brutality, segregation or the drug war. […] other examples include fast-lanes on motorway toll plazas where the rich and privileged can pass through controls quickly or the U.S. practice of checking passengers already at the foreign airport departure.”

Graham’s concept is heavily based on Michel Foucault “Boomerang Effect” from his book Society Must be Defended. Foucault explains how methods used during colonialism to control the local masses and crowds in the cities with infrastructure that connected some parts and disconnected others were brought back to the homeland. He writes: "It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself."

The planning and construction of infrastructure is funded by the state and it might not always be easy for architects with a strong sense of social responsibility to have any influence in altering projects that might be disconnecting and further alienating certain communities (with the exception of a few like Robert Moses whose agenda is questionable) – However, could architecture act as an urban acupuncture, taking on the role of a small scale infrastructure that connects? Could architects conceive infrastructures that not only connect areas but also act as Agoras, described by Martin as “the backbone of anything like a democratic city”? If so what are some projects that take on this role? And if no precedents are available then where do we start?