Spatial Violence

Studies in Architecture

Andrew Herscher, Anooradha Siddiqi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134881048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book poses spatial violence as a constitutive dimension of architecture and its epistemologies, as well as a method for theoretical and historical inquiry intrinsic to architecture; and thereby offers an alternative to predominant readings of spatial violence as a topic, event, fact, or other empirical form that may be illustrated by architecture. Exploring histories of and through architecture at sites across the globe, the chapters in the book blur the purportedly distinctive borders between war and peace, framing violence as a form of social, political, and economic order rather than its exceptional interruption. Regarding space and violence as co-constitutive, the book's collected essays critique modernization and capitalist accumulation as naturalized modes for the extraction of violence from everyday life. Focusing on the mediation of violence through architectural registers of construction, destruction, design, use, representation, theory, and history, the book suggests that violence is not only something inflicted upon architecture, but also something that architecture inflicts. In keeping with Walter Benjamin's formulation that there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism, the book offers "spatial violence" as another name for "architecture" itself. This book was previously published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review.

ANDREW HERSCHER and ANOORADHA IYER SIDDIQI

SPATIAL VIOLENCE

Was Walter Benjamin right when he wrote that there is no document of civilisation that is not also a document of barbarism?¹ If so, then “spatial violence” would offer itself as another name for “architecture”, a name that would open onto the manifold forms of harm mediated through built environments. “Spatial violence”, in this reading, may be understood not as something inflicted on architecture from the outside, but something that architecture inflicts even as it follows its own practices and protocols.

This claim may seem rather self-evident from the perspective of those who study geographies of inequality, histories of colonialism, or the politics of spatial injustice, but may we consider the concept of “spatial violence” as rooted in histories of architecture and the built environment, as offering a different critical purchase on studies of violence? One way into this question is to think about the spatial history of political violence as distinct from the other histories of political violence—to think about spatial history as a specific history. Rather than histories of spatial violence being grafted onto discourses and timelines that belong to other histories, then, perhaps, they contest the very framings represented as normative; rather than reproducing other paradigms, perhaps, instead, these spatial histories follow their own sequences, their own continuities, and their own ruptures. As theorised in this issue by Nikolina Bobic, the spatial violence of economic and territorial redistribution following a bombing campaign may instead expand the bracketing for a period of “war”; as Anoma Pieris has reckoned, battlefields may visually present themselves as suburban plots, luxury high rise apartments, or fortified public wetlands.

Matters of chronology and site are by no means the only issues at hand. The potential to construct fields and discourses quite differently from approaches in the social sciences roots the meaning of spatial violence not in a pre-existing politics for which architecture serves merely as illustration, symbol, or even representation. It suggests the activation of meaning by and within the realm of architecture, of built form, of aesthetics and materiality, of spatial practice. As such, these function as primary sources for knowledge, as archival materials. They are imbued with epistemological as well as ontological value.

Attention to “spatial violence” at once sharpens a scientific approach while also widening a disciplinary discourse. With regard to the first, it does so via a platform by which politics is not aestheticised or othered—creating distance—but is, instead, brought self-consciously closer to architecture’s own historical narratives. Along these lines, the work performed by histories of architecture and the built environment in using the concept of “spatial violence” would be to hone our understanding of the deeper and slower structural forms of violence that contour political historical categories like “development”, “reconstruction”, “modernity”, “peace”, “progress”, and so on. How so? This may in part be answered by examining the second matter: what “spatial violence” negotiates for those whose primary concerns are found in historical or theoretical scholarship that lies in a category different from and perhaps more materially, visually, and spatially particular than that of geography, planning, urban studies, or other social studies—a discipline that calls itself “architectural”, or even “Architectural”. We wish to suggest as fundamental to the understanding of architecture the mediation of violence through its native registers: construction, destruction, design, use, representation, theory, and history. For studies in and of these registers, we pose the question: What could an exploration of “spatial violence” yield, with regard to both the history of space and the history of violence?

First, as introduced above, histories of modern architecture and urbanism have often rendered spaces of violence positively and empirically, so that architectural and urban histories are periodised with respect to that form of spatial violence known as “war”, with narratives situating the political condition of war as preceding or creating the conditions for architectural production (or its absence), and, conversely, with war entering architectural and urban history insofar as it has impacted or been mediated in traditional architectural and urban practice. In so doing, these histories have at once gestured towards spatial violence while reproducing already-established disciplinary topics and concerns, leaving received protagonists of modern architecture and Euro-American states at the centre of historical narratives.

Rather than inserting architectural and urban history into histories periodised by “war” or politics as such, we seek to reimagine this category and explore the spatial history of political violence as distinct from other histories of political violence. In posing “spatial violence” as our object of study, we are interested in how histories of spatial violence interrupt other histories and, for example, offer new periodisations, new geographies, and new objects of study. As we have noted, this counters a fundamental problem—that the imbrication of violence and space in histories of architecture and urbanism has often been articulated in terms that elide frameworks for critique, and thereby reproduces violence in historiographical form. We see this historiographical form of spatial violence in interpretations that privilege the destruction of works of architecture or sovereign space through visually significant events or acts; that reinforce the role of architects or planners only as authors; that restrict authorship to acts of construction and bracket acts of destruction; that approach archival and other institutional and epistemological regimes only as sources of evidence about political violence, rather than components of violent political assemblages; and that underscore the notion that spatial forms of violence rupture an ostensibly normative fabric or form a “state of exception”, to use Carl Schmitt’s term,² as, for example, in political conflict or humanitarian crisis. We seek to overturn these formulations of spatial violence, with their pursuant architectural histories and legitimisations of political and historiographical violence, which have been subsumed under other disciplinary orders of knowledge and practice as well.

We also see, in contrast, a useful precedent in studies of vandalism and iconoclasm, which have opened to the cultural productivity and political utility of destruction, exploring it not as the negation of construction, but, rather, its violent counterpart.³ These studies have been joined by recent formulations within architectural history, critical architectural practice, and urban studies that have in various ways formed other considerations for a theory of spatial violence. In architectural and urban history, war-time destruction has emerged as an object of historical study.⁴ Meanwhile, wartime, post-war, and Cold War spaces of military defence and cultural tactics of offence have also emerged as historical objects.⁵ In critical architectural practice, “forensic architecture” has begun to describe the ruin as the spatial trace of political conflict, particularly as “evidence” of or “witness” to the infraction of international law or violation of human rights.⁶ In urban studies, cities have been framed as “wounded”, “dead”, and “resilient”, in each case defined in relation to violence.⁷ Furthermore, the status of the landscape as an aesthetic form has been supplemented by its status as site of war, universalising sacralisation, exclusivist victimhood, nationalist identity, or other mediation of political conflict and violence.⁸

With some of these ideas in mind, in questioning how the study of violence has contributed to the historical analysis of space and how the study of space has contributed to the historical analysis of violence, we have sought here both new historical narratives and a basis for historical and theoretical critique. We begin by posing normative states of order or peace as frameworks for deeper structural violence, following what Étienne Balibar has called “anti-violence, i.e., the set of practices which become necessary when it appears that the ‘civil state’ has become more violent than any ‘state of nature’”.⁹ With this, it may be possible for “spatial violence” to name the inversion of the oft-repeated formulation by Clausewitz that war is politics by other means; consider, instead, that perhaps spatial violence is war by other means.¹⁰ We thus pose spatial violence as a constitutive dimension of architecture, urbanism, and their epistemologies—more a method than a topic, to be precise, and indeed one native to historical and theoretical inquiry in architectural and urban studies. Spatial violence, in this conception, may be understood as a force that has manifested systemically (and thus, perhaps, less prominently in the chronologies and geographies of historical discourse on architecture and urbanism) through what Slavoj Žižek has described as “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence”.¹¹

Such structural violence is related to processes less immediately visible than those of directly transacted physical violence. We may find traces in the circulation of capital through phases of modernisation and development, mass urbanisation that renders ever-greater densities of population vulnerable to ecological disaster, or the ghettoisation of peripheral and interstitial territory in cities worldwide. This reading refracts expressions and understandings of the purportedly distinctive borders between war and peace, modernisation as the extraction of violence from everyday life, and capitalist accumulation as exterior to or as buttress against violent forms and processes. Here, violence emerges as a form of social, political, and economic order, rather than its exceptional interruption. Space becomes a social, political, and economic figure, rather than an empty field upon which social, political, and economic forces act themselves out.

Again, our theoretical interests are historical and historiographical. We have sought visual and spatial analyses that study political violence through historically contingent events, asking authors to construct scenes in which violence drove historical change, particularly as enacted in spatial, visual, and architectural terms, and through direct transactions as well as more subtle structural forms of violence. We asked authors to consider the roles that architects and architectures have played in advancing or resisting violence. At the same time, we have also been interested in analyses that expose the violence enacted by history and the historian. In this, we ask, what new historiographical practice or model does “spatial violence” offer?

In part, our response to this question must refer to our own prolonged engagement with the problem of “spatial violence” and the forms this has taken. Within an academic–industrial milieu in which “productive” scholars are pressured by institutions into cyclical manufacture and creation of the new, we have especially attempted to sustain engagement with this question over time, labouring with it over some years in relation to different institutions and environments, which has also enabled us to problematise “spatial violence” with different disciplinary connections. Our initial articulations followed a panel titled “Violence” in the 2012 Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning, and Preservation symposium, The Dis-Appearing Non-West, with the New York University Institute of Fine Arts Daniel H. Silberberg lecture series convened around a theme of the same name during the following 2012–2013 academic year.¹² In 2014, co-chairing the panel, “Spatial Violence”, at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting led us directly to the conception of this special issue.¹³ Our attempt to recast this dialogue in different venues and formats has in part been an attempt to resist the historiographical violence of fast-tracked modes of research, and we would like to credit the individuals behind these institutional settings that enabled this protracted inquiry.

Vis-à-vis the essays in this issue, our questions began with the analysis of spatial or territorial redistribution, intervention, and politics in relation to violence, in particular the strategies for the reorganisation of economies, societies, and power, how these strategies have been articulated in relation to violent acts or processes, and any putative prevention of or recovery from them. Many of the essays explore the ramifications of the spatial, material, visual, and social dimensions of the built environment upon the political activities that this environment is produced to accommodate, and upon the violence that attends this environment’s imaginary, construction, representation, inhabitation, destruction, and reconstruction. The authors in this issue have described and analysed the participation of architecture and urbanism in political violence, while considering the contribution of architectural and urban history to the legitimisation, naturalisation, and masking of political violence. In so doing, they have registered the sometimes profound discontinuities between political ideology and intention on the one hand, and spatial effect and consequence on the other.

One form of historiography that counters this spatial violence, then, locates alternate archives and positions them as primary. This method recognises the precariousness of the official archive as an epistemological focus, sometimes quite literally a target for transgression, systemic neglect, or violent reconstruction. This form of historiography also acknowledges the potential of these dynamics as alternative objects of study.¹⁴ Social historians have shown us methods that include the development of oral histories in conjunction with formal archival focus, or the occasionally cumbersome additional fieldwork of locating private or cached documents not held in zones of official status, or housed in spaces that work unofficially to represent the sovereign, or corporations or other forces that elide the sovereign.

Another alternate archival form, normative in studies of pre-moder...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Spatial Violence
• 2. On “Revolutionary Vandalism”
• 3. Architecture During Wartime: The Mostra d’Oltremare and Esposizione Universale di Roma
• 4. Sentenced: Architecture of Solitary Confinement
• 5. The Economy of Fear: Oscar Newman Launches Crime Prevention through Urban Design (1969 – 197x)
• 6. New Belgrade After 1999: Spatial Violence as De-Socialisation, De-Romanisation, and De-Historisation
• 7. Mud, Dust, and Marougé: Precarious Construction in a Congolese Refugee Camp
• 8. Encampments: Spatial Taxonomies of Sri Lanka’s Civil War
• Index