The City in Transgression

Human Mobility and Resistance in the 21st Century

Benedict Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000093551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The City in Transgression explores the unacknowledged, neglected, and ill-defined spaces of the built environment and their transition into places of resistance and residence by refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, the homeless, and the disadvantaged.

The book draws on urban and spatial theory, socio-economic factors, public space, and architecture to offer an intimate look at how urban sites and infrastructure are transformed into spaces for occupation. Anderson proposes that the varied innovations and adaptations of urban spaces enacted by such marginalized figures – for whom there are no other options – herald a radical new spatial programming of cities. The book explores cities and sites such as Mexico City and London, the Mexican/US border, the Calais Jungle, and Palestinian camps in Beirut and utilizes concepts associated with 'mobility' – such as anarchy, vagrancy, and transgression – alongside photography, 3D modelling, and 2D imagery. From this constellation of materials and analysis, a radical spatial picture of the city in transgression emerges.

By focusing on the 'underside of urbanism', The City in Transgression reveals the potential for new spatial networks that can cultivate the potential for self-organization so as to counter the existing dominant urban models of capital and property and to confront some of the major issues facing cities amid an age of global human mobility.

This book is valuable reading for those interested in architectural theory, modern history, human geography and mobility, climate change, urban design, and transformation.

1 Movement

Interview

CRCarola Rackete, Captain of Sea Watch III migrant sea rescue ship

SSStephen Sackur, Presenter of Hardtalk, BBC World Service, September 4, 2019

CRWhen you talk to the refugees who come from Libya, a country at civil war and you understand what they have been through then risking a bit of your white privilege suddenly is very, very little…. There is a lack of solidarity within the European Union to distribute the people who arrive over the sea route and due to the Dublin III system, that burden is carried by the states of the southern border of Italy…. The European Union is building a border, they are doing an external organization of that border already far south of Libya, so they are already deterring people [from] entering into there, they are also pulling back via the Libyan coastguard.

SSArrivals by sea to Italy have dropped by 84% from 2018 figure, 97% down from the 2017 figure. So right now, as we speak today, Italy with its tough stand has ensured, let us be honest, that thousands of people who were going to attempt to make that crossing and would have put themselves at risk are no longer doing so. That should be celebrated, shouldn’t it?

Carola Rackete notes that there is no UN charter concerning the rights of climate change refugees.

CRI think we have to see the fact that migration as such is just a fact of human life, I mean anyone outside Africa has come from Africa at some time, right. The point is that due to the whole, say history of colonialization, the large inequalities between the global poor and the global rich, there is a lot of reasons for people to migrate and there is a lot of injustice between people around the globe and as long as we don’t resolve that, people will just migrate and particularly due to the climate breakdown.

SSYou would, and other NGOs would, recognize the obligation to help these what you call ‘climate refugees’ and there could be millions of them, literally millions of them, seeking, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, to enter Europe. Are you saying that Europe has a legal as well as a moral obligation to take all of these migrants?

CRWell, you have to look at the facts, which are first and foremost that most people, when they migrate, they go very, very short distances because especially the global poor just don’t have the money to move very far. So when we are thinking of the effects of climate breakdown like changes in precipitation, crop failure, famine, most people will starve very close to their homes; they are not going to come here, you know. The percentage of people who cross a border is very low, most of them stay in neighboring countries, so really, we are talking about possibly a much likely higher number than we have now, but most of the people who will be displaced … are going short distances.

CR[There exists] a lack of solidarity in Europe in rescuing these people.

SSThere is a solidarity of people who see themselves defending their interests.

The previous conversation is an excerpt of a transcript of an extended interview by BBC presenter Stephen Sackur and the Sea Rescue Captain of Sea Watch III Carola Rackete. I chose this exchange between Rackete and Sackur for the poignancy with which each is asking, defending, and answering. The program Hardtalk, hosted by Sackur, invites guests who include humanitarian, scientific, cultural, social, and political leaders in their field from around the world to ask what motivates them in doing what they do, praising some and provoking others to question the motives, actions, and ramifications of their decisions on people’s lives, societies, nations, and Earth. For the September 4, 2019 Hardtalk presentation, Carola Rackete was in the chair highlighting and defending her decision as the Captain of the Sea Watch III rescue ship to dock at the port of Lampedusa without approval from the country’s authorities. Captain Rackete’s ship had rescued 53 refugees from a rubber dinghy whose outboard motor had run out of fuel. They had no food or water and were at the mercy of the vast deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea. Exercising her duty as required by International Maritime Law to rescue seafarers whose lives are in danger, she took the step to take them aboard her ship, feeding, sheltering, and medically treating those in need. Captain Rackete, her crew, and their refugee passengers found themselves stranded on the high seas. After repeated requests to dock at the closest port – in this case the Italian island of Lampedusa – as required under International Maritime Law were rejected by the port authorities, her predicament grew increasingly urgent. The Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, Minister of the Interior at the time and leader of the far-right party Northern League, Matteo Salvini, had prohibited all rescue ships carrying refugees from docking in Italian ports. Running out of food and water and concerned for the safety of her crew and passengers in an increasingly fraught and dangerous situation, Captain Rackete decided she had no other choice than to forcefully dock her ship at the port of Lampedusa so that her exhausted migrant passengers, some needing urgent medical attention, could disembark and be cared for. With accusations of intentionally colliding with a police coastguard boat while docking her ship in the middle of the night on June 29, a stand-off ensued, and following intense international pressure, her passengers were eventually allowed to disembark. For exercising her obligation under International Maritime Law, Captain Rackete was charged with intending to cause grievous harm, placed under house arrest and later tried. The Italian judge sided with Rackete’s version of events. Rackete was subsequently acquitted, released, and was allowed to eventually return to her native country Germany.

Oceans, seas, and continents have both expanded and constrained human mobility. The fluidity of the endless depth and breadth of blue is demarcated by unseen undercurrents of friction and resistance. A boat floating on the surface without a sail or engine drifts to the navigation of these flows. The histories of human migration have partially rested on these hidden frictions and resistance flows as much as they have on land. Lost in the vast dimensions of blue water when landmass falls out of sight, only the best navigators find another landmass on which to plant their feet. Ground movement across geographies, topographies, and terrains preceded this fluid human mobility. Clans and tribes walked their way across ice flows, deserts, mountains, forests, valleys, and rivers. As the flows of the oceans and seas and the paths taken through topographies and terrains assisted the flows of human mobility, their evacuations and arrivals multiplied and populated across Earth over tens of thousands of years. Yet, modern-day human flows have not shared the same sense of exploration. Modern human flows are split into vastly disproportionate access between peoples and the world. While one small group is propelled across the skies, seamlessly traversing invisible borders aboard jets of compressed air, another group, far larger yet marginalized by enforced constraints, walk out of deserts, escaping war, famine, terror, multiple and unimaginable forms of persecution, to crowd onto rubber boats seeking refuge in foreign lands. These modern-day seafarers float into invisible borders defended by coastguards, the sanctuary of humanitarian rescue ships, and victimization and detention in the countries of their arrival.

The present political contestation unfolding between refugees and asylum seekers, the seas, sovereignty, humanitarian rights, and right-wing protectionist policies concerning the freedoms of human mobility across the world exposes the divisions and vulnerabilities of peoples, countries, and continents. Contestation between people, mobility, sovereignty, and countries has been marked by human migration. Conflicts between people and mobility, land and sea, marginalization and expulsion, digital technology, time, space, and world have not let up over tens of thousands of years of human migration and settlement across the globe. From early tribal conflicts over ground to the modern technology of electromagnetic waves first captured by radio and later the Cathay Tube to deliver live announcements and telecasts to the digital transponders and undersea cables that deliver the internet of all things as rotating satellites flow in the outer limits of location and displacement transmit real-time communications between humans and continents, a set of new human-ground conflicts are emerging. As mentioned in the Introduction, the rapid movements of digital technologies delivering news, information, and images that appear simultaneously on the screens of billions of smartphones and computers, people’s rapid eye movements scrolling through the data is countered by the far slower analogue speed of human movement across the globe. Telecommunications have shrunk the world; collapsing oceans and seas, continents and countries, mountain ranges and deserts. The modern-day peril attached to human migration is not restricted to the asylum seeker, refugee, and migrant – it is a threat that inhabits everyone, for the evolution of human existence in mobility falls into scales of devastation as each image is captured, telecasted, and ruined from the screens of desire to the harshness of protectionism.

Figure 1.1 Deep blue sea

Source: photo by author 2019

Being in transit – whether physical bodily presence or digital accessibility – has become a condition of being in the world, marking and demarcating the geo-spatial and geo-political divisions of continents, oceans, seas, atmospheres, and humans. The global consciousness of telecommunication flows contends with the global physical consciousness of place. Evenness and unevenness extend across the global routes of human mobility; restricting and forging friction between vast numbers of people. Human mobility in the 21st century is not a granted human right to move unhindered across the Earth. Human mobility is a privilege granted to the privileged. Dangerous journeys undertaken by refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants across the routes of land and sea often end in being out-of-space and in-between places, locations, and nations. This is most clearly evident to those people who are caught and then restrained in the non-places of transit zones, detention centers, and refugee camps. For the millions of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants fleeing wars, famines, climate change, and racial, religious, cultural, sexual, and gender persecution, this becomes their reality. Where the historical roots of humanity’s diversity were founded on the routes of migration that shaped our world, creating our languages, cultures, and beliefs, modern-day human mobility is intersected and dissected in the spaces of the sovereignty of nation states playing on the threats and fears of people to sow internal and external discontent. Not everyone is caught in the political, racial, cultural, and religious subjugation of refugees and asylum seekers.

Captain Rackete and millions of others like her take steps to find a route, to give ground and create opportunities for people who need rescuing and shelter so that they may plant their feet on safe ground. Privileged mobility, which is in stark contrast to detained immobility, like the walls of division, will eventually be overcome. The once exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Movement
• 2 Urban mobility
• 3 Indeterminant occupation
• 4 Ousted vagrancy
• 5 Collective anarchy
• 6 City in transgression
• 7 Unbounded mobility
• Index