Common Lines of Flight towards the Open City

Prologue

Evolving theories of defence and securitization have underwritten the territorializations and deterritorializations of the city, shaping transformations of metropolis, megalopolis and metacity explored in this section (see Chapter 36). In the post-9/11 era, the distributed architectures of the twenty-first century metacity are being mediated by new infrastructures that enable overt and covert systems of discipline, control, regulation and resistance. This essay tracks such networked assemblages as they intersect in the hybrid spaces of the commons, spectacle, camp, museum, checkpoint and watchtower – way stations of a pilgrimage which can never return to the idealizations of the imperial metropolis captured by the locution ‘White City’. Embodied in the monochrome exceptionalism of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the White City of the global North would be contested in the post-Cold War metacity, no less so than by the variegated urbanisms that infiltrated the complex topographies of Amman, Jordan, a self-named White City of the global South.

The urbanizing assemblages of the meta-city invoke the conditions of a new città aperta – the Open City – a state of exception posited by the codes of land warfare during the twentieth century, in which military practices of defence and attack were provisionally suspended. A new era of catastrophic aerial bombardment had produced treaties which acknowledged the privileged status of cultural patrimony and sought to spare urban landmarks from destruction. Articulated within the scripts of conventional warfare, the proposed Open City addressed threats to the historiographic narrative, calling for urban preservation through a demilitarized interregnum to be declared in anticipation of imminent occupation of the city by the enemy (see also Chapter 18). At the same time, the [Page 688]demilitarized hiatus opened up new terrains of resistance for insurgents who infiltrated urban space from which protocols of military attack and defence had been prohibited.

The twenty-first century's urban securitizations recall the città aperta's ambiguities. Embedded among the metacity's legacy infrastructures, militarized new technologies and practices – both overt and covert – are being effectively demilitarized through a process of coercive normalization. Always anticipating imminent occupation by the enemy, the new Open City hovers in the lacunae between attack and defence, as insurgencies mobilize in the destabilized milieu to reclaim the prerogatives of civil society.

Bentham's prison had ‘turned utopia inside out’ (Ellin 1997, 16), improving modernity's individual deviant through confinement and a ‘panoptic structuring of visibility’ (Bogard 2006, 110). Haussman's metropolitan boulevards projected discipline beyond prison walls into the city of emergent capital flows, enabling the surveillance and militarized control of the metropolis and its dangerous classes (Harvey 2006, 21). Civil defence tropes that warned of ‘the enemy within’ enlisted suburban compliance throughout the regional-scale diffusions and accelerating flows of the Cold War megalopolis (Farish 2007; Colomina 2007; May 1999). Following the attacks of 9/11, preemptive risk management deployed surveillant assemblages to produce data used to calculate actuarial statistics relating to risk (Lyon 2005, 34), effectively indicting suspect groups before crimes had been committed.

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