# Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

The following text is the transcript of an audio recording found on dytopolitik. In it, Giorgio Agamben interprets Michel Foucault's chapter in Discipline and Punish about the shift from an exclusive urban scheme based on the leprosis management to a disciplinary urban scheme based on the plague management. In fact, according to Foucault, the sovereignty on life itself has been replaced in the XVIIIth century by a biopolitical sovereignty that consider life in its anatomical and biological dimensions in order to both ensure its power and maintain them in a state of continuous work production.

Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: 'Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist'. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however 'pure', general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won't enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.

I would like to start from a banal consideration on the etymology of the word metropolis. As you know, in Greek, metropolis means Mother City and refers to the relationship between cities and colonies. The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis(1). As you know this meaning of the word is still current and is today used to express the relationship of the metropolitan territory of the home to the colonies. The first instructive observation suggested by the etymology is that the word metropolis has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dishomogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. And this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as an urban, continuous and relatively homogeneous tissue (2). This is the first consideraton: the isonomy that defines the Greek polis as a model of political city is excluded from the relation between metropolis and colony, and therefore the term metropolis, when transposed to describe an urban fabric, carries this fundamental dishomogeneity with it. So I propose that we keep the term metropolis for something substantially other from the city, in the traditional conception of the polis, i.e. something politically and spatially isonomic. I suggest to use this term, metropolis, to designate the new urban fabric that emerges in parallel with the processes of transformation that Michel Foucault defined as the shift from the territorial power of the ancient regime, of sovereignty, to modern biopower, that is in its essence governmental.

This means that to understand what a metropolis is one needs to understand the process whereby power progressively takes on the character of government of things and the living, or if you like of an economy. Economy means nothing but government, in the 18th century, the government of the living and things. The city of the feudal system of the ancient regime was always in a situation of exception in relation to the large territorial powers, it was the citta franca, relatively autonomous from the great territorial powers (3). So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things.

We cannot go into the complexity of the transformation of power into government. Government is not dominion and violence, it is a more complex configuration that traverses the very nature of the governed thus implying their freedom, it is a power that is not transcendental but immanent, its essential character is that it is always, in its specific manifestation, a collateral effect, something that originates in a general economy and falls onto the particular (4). When the US strategists speak of collateral damage they have to be taken literally: government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on subjects.

Going back to the metropolis, my idea is that we are not facing a process of development and growth of the old city, but the institution of a new paradigm whose character needs to be analysed. Undoubtedly one of its main traits is that there is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicization, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public.

Michel Foucault tried to define some of the essential characters of this urban space in relation to 'governmentality.' According to him, there is a convergence of two paradigms that were hitherto distinct: leprosy and the plague. The paradigm of leprosy was clearly based on exclusion, it required that the lepers were 'placed outside' the city. In this model, the pure city keeps the stranger outside, the "Great Confinement": enclose and exclude (5). The model of the plague is completely different and gives rise to another paradigm. When the city is plagued it is impossible to move the plague victims outside. On the contrary, it is a case of creating a model of surveillance, control, and articulation of urban spaces. These are divided into sections, within each section each road is made autonomous and placed under the surveillance of an intendant; nobody can go out of the house but every day the houses are checked, each inhabitant controlled, how many are there, are they dead etc. It is the imposition of a grid upon urban territory surveilled by intendants, doctors and soldiers. So whilst the leper was rejected by an apparatus of exclusion, the plague victim is encased, surveilled, controlled and cured through a complex web of dispositifs that divide and individualize, and in so doing also articulate the efficiency of control and of power.

Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of social exclusion, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm. According to Foucault, the political space of modernity is the result of these two paradigms: at some point the leper starts being treated like a plague victim, and vice versa. In other words, there emerges a projection onto the framework of exclusion and separation of leprosy, of the arrangement of surveillance, control, individualization and the articulation of disciplinary power, so that it becomes a case of individualizing, subjectivating and correcting the leper by treating him like a plague victim. So there is a double capture: on the one hand the simple binary opposition of diseased/healthy, mad/normal etc. and on the other hand there is a whole complicated series of differentiating dispositions of technologies and dispositifs that subjectify, individuate and control subjects. This is a first useful framework for a general definition of metropolitan space today and it also explains the very interesting things you were talking about here: the impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialization, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.

I remember Genoa 2001: I thought it was an experiment to treat the historical center of an old city, still characterized by an ancient architectural structure, to see how in this center one could suddenly create walls, gates that not only had the function of excluding and separating but were also there to articulate different spaces and individualize spaces and subjects. This analysis that Foucault summarily sketches out can be further developed and deepened. But now I want to end on a different note and concentrate on a different point.

I said that the city is a dispositif, or a group of dispositifs. The theory that you referred to earlier was the summary idea that one could divide reality into, on the one hand, humans and living beings, and, on the other, the dispositifs that continuously capture and take hold of them. However, the third fundamental element that defines a dispositif, for Foucault too I think, is the series of processes of subjectivation that result from the relation, the corpo a corpo, between individuals and dispositifs (6). There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation; to speak of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects.

What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated. Obviously this is also complicated by the fact that modern dispositifs not only entail the creation of a subjectivity but also and equally processes of de-subjectivation. This might have always been the case, think about confession, which shaped Western subjectivity (the formal confession of sins), or juridical confession, which we still experience today. Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance, in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of subjectivation that they create. But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes attached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque.

I think that a confrontation with metropolitan dispositifs will only be possible when we penetrate the processes of subjectivation that the metropolis entails in a more articulated way, deeper. Because I think that the outcome of conflicts depends on this: on the power to act and intervene on processes of subjectivation, in order to reach that stage that I would call a point of ungovernability. The ungovernable where power can shipwreck in its figure of government, the ungovernable that I think is always the beginning and the line of flight of all politics.

Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files.

Translator's notes:
(1) allontanarsi is the verb used in the original;
(2) tessuto: material, cloth, woven fabric;
(3) citta franca is so called because it is exempt from feudal tax (franca = free, nice idiom: farla franca, 'getting away with it');
(4) ricade sul particolare: falls onto but also hangs and incumbs on;
(5) These reflections can be found in Michel Foucault's Lectures on Les Anormaux, given at the College de France in 1975, specifically this issue is treated on 15th January, Lecture II. The 1975 lectures are published in English by Verso as The Abnormals (London: 2003), in French by Gallimard (Paris: 1999) and in Italian by Feltrinelli (Milan: 2000). Excellent stuff;
(6) Funny how in English there is head to head and face to face, but no body to body. The Leviathan;
(7) assoggettamento;
(8) the usual conundrum: capacitá in Italian.

# Metropolis II by Chris Burden on Transit-City

Francois Bellanger very recently released a post about Chris Burden's new installation which could easily be considered as the artistic manifesto of Transit-City.
In fact, this installation, Metropolis II, is a monumental metropolitan race track on which 1200 hot wheels cars are driving at high speed. It can sound a bit too straight forward to represent Los Angeles' circulation as the artist asserts; however, watching the video above is a good way to realize that the speed frenzy occurring within this tentacular race track becomes very interesting if not hypnotic...

# Mapping holey spaces on Pruned and BldgBlog

I am pretty sure that only few of my readers do not read BLDGBLOG, but I nevertheless wanted to draw attention on a very recent article Geoff Manaugh has been published. This article is a sort of sequel of one Alexander Trevi wrote on Pruned in last February. Both introduce a project that succeeded to 3d-scan a subterranean architecture.
The first one on Pruned is the digital reconstruction (in little dots) of the 2km long tunnel underneath the Mexican city of Guanajato by the artists The North Room. (the project is entitled La Subterranea)
The second one on BLDGBLOG is a similar scan (this time with surfaces and textures application) of the tunnels and caves network of the city of Nottingham. This incredibly rich survey has been organized and effectuated by the local instances of government associated with the University of Nottingham. See the official website of the Nottingham Caves Survey
Geoff published one video on his blog but there are many others and I would like to propose three here which explore three caves of breweries and public houses.

courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey

# Capitalism's Architecture

Here is another text I originally wrote for my post-professional thesis...

So far, I have been focusing exclusively on the militaro-political aspect of the problem I propose to study in this essay. However, it would be deceiving not to evoke the economical system this first aspect attempts to protect: in the Western world, namely Capitalism. In fact, Capitalism as well necessities a space, and architecture, more or less consciously is ready to provide it.
This chapter will be divided into three parts which will attempt to explore the process of gentrification and the two paradigmatic examples of capitalist architecture that are the privately owned public spaces and the shopping malls.

Gentrification is a process extremely illustrative of how Capitalism operates. In fact, only a part of the capitalist system is based on the more or less objective value of manpower and raw materials. A very important other part is provided only by values that are based exclusively on the virtual. That is how a low social class’ neighborhood that despite a not so comfortable aspect, provides a relatively cheap place to live in the center of a city, can be transformed into the new area where the wealthy youth has to spend their nights.
This process usually starts without any transcendental will, with a little amount of middle class young people who decide to move to this kind of districts in order to benefit of the low rents and the authenticity of the neighborhood. Politics, speculators and developers do not need a lot of time before becoming aware of the potential of such area in the center of the city. For the first ones, it constitutes a good opportunity to get rid of a population that is considered as risky and marginal; for the second and third ones, it is a very good way to develop a good financial investment. When politics are taking measure to transform this “dangerous neighborhood where nobody want to come out at night” into a “better and safer place” –understand a place that the authorities can fully control-, speculators buy the current buildings, increase considerably the rent from years to years until the tenants cannot pay anymore and eventually replace them with a population can pay or even destroy the concerned buildings. The developers can then intervene and build new complexes of commercial activities and condominiums.
Gentrification sometimes necessities a dozen of years to become actually effective; however it often implement itself in a much faster way, such as in Williamsburg in Brooklyn where it only took six years to transform a low social class black area into one of the main hipster place of New York City.

Capitalism does not stand not to be in full control of every space of the city. It does not bear either that its best architectural invention, the skyscraper that virtually reproduces infinitely a parcel of land for only once its price, could be limited by urban codes. That is how, in 1961, the City of New York made a deal with private entities in order to reform those codes. In exchange of a significant area of public space on their parcel, corporations and private owners would be authorized to build their towers higher. However, this little zone of public space was not meant to be given to the city so those private actors remained the owners and controllers of this area. They therefore keep the right to authorize or forbid activities to occur and persons to pass on those spaces. Under an appearance of openness, privately owned public spaces are in fact extremely selective of their public. Employees working in the towers are of course welcome; those open spaces are part of a post-modern biopolitical capitalism that appears as taking good care of its subjects. People who spend money on those sites in order to buy coffee, hot dogs, or newspapers are also targeted for this type of public spaces. Others are regarded as unwelcomed and even suspect and can even be asked to leave in case of a “subversive” activity such as playing with a ball, taking pictures or picnicking.
Both corporations and governments are satisfied with those public spaces. Corporations are able to build higher their skyscrapers, provide open space for their employees, developing commercial activities while governments see their public space being maintained by private actors and any potential space of gathering being controlled and supervised.

Shopping malls are another typology of private spaces open to the public under determined circumstances. Once again, two birds are being killed with one stone: the paradigm of the Greek Agora as public space is replaced by a hyper-controlled space owned by private corporations AND this space is able to be highly productive in consumption.
First shopping malls in their contemporary version are said to have been invented by the Austrian-American Victor Gruen in the mid 50’s. In fact, he is probably the one to have thought of those pure capitalist architectures as pieces of urbanism. In an America that was tremendously starting to move its middle class –to whom shopping mall are addressed- in large spread out suburbia, shopping malls were going to become the equivalent of Europeans old cities’ centers, a pedestrian place of gathering and activity. However, probably observing that those European public spaces had been the same spaces that hosted the various national revolutions and insurrections, the United States placed this new kind of public space within the frame of a private supervision, control and police. As Mike Davis describes it for Los Angeles: “The ‘public spaces’ of the new megastructures and supermalls have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional comportments under the gaze of private police forces.” By designing this space as an interior area accessible by definite entrances and supervised by dozen of video cameras and sensors, corporations were assured to limit to the minimum the population that was not welcomed on “their public space”.
The design is also oriented in order to compose a whole interior fantastic world of itself that is supposed to be perceived as better than the reality. This world is safe, clean, warm, entertaining and attractive and it is always a disappointment to leave it for the consumer who forgot reality thanks to it.

The main characteristic of capitalist design is to leave nothing to chance. Indeed chance provokes uncertainty and uncertainty provides an illegibility that can be unproductive for Capitalism. Supermarkets’ products are placed on their shelves according to various consumers surveys and marketing studies; malls are designed in such a way that in order to reach the place their consumers intended to visit, they would have see the integrality of the shops in presence; hyper-visibility discourage homeless people, kids and political activists to take place on private piazzas etc. Legibility is the ability of Capitalism to transform space into an object, both marketable and controllable.

# Low Tech intelligence on Deconcrete

Our friend Daniel Fernandez Pascual from Deconcrete recently published two very interesting articles involving very cheap processes of construction.

The first one introduces La Havana's Barbacoas (unformal mezzanine added illegally to the old colonial buildings of the city) and Andiamos (scaffolding preventing buildings to collapse), the second ones inviting (or suggesting) the first ones to exist in a beautiful ambiguity of decay and urban appropriation.

The second one involves the collective Inteligencias Colectiva which investigatesvernacular smart modes of construction and introduce the example of Justo Gallego’s self-built cathedral constructed with concrete reinforced by cheap metallic spinning bar.

# The Oblique Function by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

Sometimes I like to revisit the classics ! The Oblique Function was first developed in the 60's by Architecture Principe (Claude Parent & Paul Virilio) and since then is still the main element of Parent's architecture (see previous article).
The idea was to tilt the ground in order to revolutionize the old paradigm of the vertical wall. In fact, being inclined, the wall becomes experiencable and so are the cities imagined by the two French architects. The oblique is fundamentally interested in how a body physically experience a space. The slope implies an effort to climb up and a speed to climb down; this way the body cannot abstract itself from the space and feel the degrees of inclination.
Parent and Virilio associated this research with their bunker archeology (see previous article) in order to design the Church Sainte Bernadette in Nevers (France) that I should probably include in a near future article...
Claude Parent demonstrated the quality of the oblique for the French Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale as I already wrote in a former article.

# Form follows Tax on Deconcrete

Daniel Fernandez Pascual recently published on Deconcrete an article as short as interesting about New Orleans' "shotguns houses". In fact, those houses have been shaped by the fact that tax applied on the frontage; by adopting the narrowest form as possible, those houses' owners were paying less taxes.
The second reason for such a name "shotgun" is explained by Candy Chang as a house typology that would allow to shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard !
Both D.F. Pascual and C. Chang then evoked a similarity with the land ownership along the Mississippi (see the beautiful map below) reduced to its minimum as frontage, just wide enough to be able to load ships.

# Magic Highway by Walt Disney 1958

Here is a little video created by the Walt Disney studios in 1958 which illustrates the high craze for cars and highways in the mid-XXth century and the optimist vision of a technological future.

# Netropolis by Michael Najjar

Michael Najjar's hybrid photographs compose phantom cities by superimposition of their own components. The abundance of buildings triggers both a visual suffocation and a fascination for the poetry of their hybridization.
Netropolis is composed by twelve photographs of this kind based on Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo, London and Beijing.

# PALESTINIAN CHRONICLES /// Duheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem

The Palestinian refugee camps which are present in most cities of the West Bank and the Gaza strip are precarious pieces of urbanism similar to slums that host the village population that was living on the territory that was given to Israel in 1948 by the United Nations. Duheisha is one of those camps in Bethlehem hosting currently around 10 000 people.
The main problem with refugee camps is that every new building, construction, renovation are ratifications of the situation and seen as a resignation to it. The architecture developed there is thus very handmade, almost accidental sometimes but creates a surprising form of beauty.

# Barcelona and Paris, cities of sand

Borrowing Ethel Baraona's quote of today: “There is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone” -Jorge Luis Borges

Being currently in the Middle East, it will be hard for me to get my mind out of it. Here are two pictorial invasions of the desert in European cities, Barcelona and Paris. The first was a campaign of information during Barcelona's drought in 2008 and the second one is the not so new Cedric Klapish's Peut être (1999) that dramatized a near futuristic Paris which has been filled by the sand. Life being on the roof, a whole subterranean way of living is happening inside the former buildings; unfortunately it seems that it was not Klapisch's main interest...

# The obscure history of suburbia by Noam Chomsky, Peter Galison and Mike Davis

Respectively in 5 Codes, War Against the Center and City of Quartz, Noam Chomsky, Peter Galison and Mike Davis bring other explanations about the creation of Suburbia than the most known one concerning the idea of an American visceral desire for land ownership.

- In the following excerpt, Noam Chomsky evokes the 1940's General Motors, Firestone Rubber and Standart Oil California's conspiracy to buy and destroy the urban collective transportation system in order to make cars and oil as indispensable as they are today. This conspiracy was then followed and institutionally implemented by the Eisenhower Administration's National Interstate and Defense Highway Act in 1956 which was the first real step of what we nowadays call "urban spreading".

Noam Chomsky: It [suburbia] was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate public transportation, destroy the inner cities, forces everyone to use cars, trucks. And in the 1940’s there was an authentic conspiracy, a real one, between General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil California to buy up the public transportation, destroy it, and force everyone into buses and cars. The conspiracy went to court and they were convicted and fined –I think $5000 or something. Then the government moved in and took it over, under cover of defense.

Stephan Truby: You mean President Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956?

Noam Chomsky: Yes. The pretext of the National Defense Highway Act was that we have to move missiles around the country. But the point of it was to massively subsidize road transportation –cars, trucks, gasoline and so on- and to undermine public transportation.

Chomsky Noam in conversation with Daniel Mock and Stephan Truby on Homeland, Paranoia and Security in Igmade. 5 CODES. Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror. Basel: Birkhauser 2006

- In War Against the Center, Peter Galison establishes that suburbia was created in the very beginning of the Cold War as a military strategy of dispersion in order to avoid the possibility for a nuclear strike to affect too considerably the United States. Even the planning of the road would then be extremely important: evacuation roads, military reinforcement road (I even heard about highways that was designed to allow planes to land on them), replacement roads in case of the first being destroyed etc.

“It was in this context that in August 1951, the president announced a national policy for industrial dispersion, and the National Security Resources Board quickly followed with a booklet entitled Is Your Plant a Target? that proclaimed, “The risk of an all-out atomic attack on the United States grows greater each day, since we are no longer the sole possessor of the secret of the atomic bomb. This means that no industrial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attack.”20 To guarantee survival, the National Security Resources Board insisted, would require that productive capacity be protected: “The dispersion (or deployment in space) of new plant development for war-supporting industries can make American production less vulnerable to attack.” Space could protect men at the battlefield, the authors continued, and space, by multiplying targets, would diminish “the vulnerability of any one concentration.””

Galison Peter. War Against the Center Grey Room. Cambridge: MIT Press 2001

- One last component of this political interpretation of suburbia's birth is brought by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz (and also in Michael Sorkin's Variations on a Theme Park). In this book about Los Angeles, Davis affirms that public space in the American city has been destroyed for a reason of control and security, free gathering of people being too hazardous and uncertain for a system that bases its self-sustainability in the anticipation of its subjects' behaviors. Suburbia is thus a way to kill the Mediterranean street to replace it by the road or the highway that prevent any social interaction between people.

"The 'public' spaces of the new megastructures and supermall have supplanted tradtionnal streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional compartments under the gaze of private police forces."

Davis Mike. City of Quartz. London: Verso 1990

Another very interesting book about suburbia (more on its urban typology than on its history though) is Alan Berger's Drosscape. Wasting Land in Urban America

# The poetry of Chicago's emergency staircases

I've been visiting the beautiful city of Chicago recently and I've been particularly impressed by the beauty of those tall buildings' emergency staircases. No one seems to have been really thought trough or designed and that's maybe why their delicateness and their infinite ascension triggers the imagination...

# Transit-City's workshop about Chicago

The next Transit-City's workshop will occur this Friday June 4th in the Pavillon de l'Arsenal in Paris. The issue's topic Francois Bellanger proposes is: What if it was between 1910 and 1930 in Chicago that the XXIst century compact, fluid and complex city had been invented ?

The guest will be Jean Castex who wrote a book entitled Chicago 1910-1930: Le chantier d'une ville moderne.

More information on Transit-City's website.

#Faster than china by FREAKS freearchitects.

Here is a (very) short film made by a young interesting office FREAKS freearchitects (Paris, FR), this movie as been made during august 2007 maybe we can qualified it as a "pre-crisis" work. so far even if the message of the video is pretty tough, the pictures are kind of enthusiastic!!

Enjoy!

# They use our books, let's use theirs !

I am often desperate to see that some excellent authors of "resistance" are being used by the forces they were fighting against in the first place (not to talk about the tremenduous amount of 60's rock songs which are now systematically used in commercials !). What I (We?) forgot sometimes is that we can do the same thing: DETOURNER as the Situationists would put it.

So here is the book all offered to the Detournement since an architect who would like some simple solutions to create an environment less based on paranoia would just have to design the contrary of what it advocates. Its author, Barry Poyner wanted Design against Crime to be a kind of sequel of Defensible Space written in 1972 by Oscar Newman. Without ever making a distinction between homicide, robbery, burglary and vandalism, Poyner's thesis is that "the layout of neighbourhoods, the form of streets, the design of housing and the planning of schools can be said to contribute to the likelihood of crime”

At the beginning of the book he recalls the four Newman's principles to invent controlled and secured public housings:
1. Territoriality: The sub-division and zoning of communal space in and around residential building to promote proprietary attitudes among residents.
2. Natural Surveillance: The positioning of apartment windows to allow residents to naturally survey the exterior and interior public areas of their living environment.
3. Image: The use of building forms and idioms to avoid the stigma of public housing.
4. Milieu: Locating residential projects to face onto areas of the city considered safe (such as heavily-trafficked streets, institutional areas and government offices).

He also advocate for the suppression of semi-public environment (like decks, platforms, galleries etc.) and even more radically for a regulation of children density in residences (!!!):
“Wilson pointed out that efforts were already being made to allocate new tenants to housing with this in mind. Also, where local authorities are rehabilitating older blocks, modifications can be made to change the size of units to achieve mixes of one-, two-, and three bedroom dwellings. No clear guideline can be given for recommending maximum child densities. The study by Wilson defined blocks with low child densities as containing an average of three or less children per ten dwellings, but this would be too stringent as a guideline for housing allocation policies. However, what might be a more realistic approach would be to limit allocation of new tenancies in blocks with large amounts of unsupervisable communal space to all-adult households.”

Each scale is being studied and optimized for the sake of security. From the urban organization of a residential district to the door's material via anti-burglary houses, anti-pickpockets markets and anti-vandalism schools. A nauseous vision of a seamless world where rich are not being stolen and poors remain calm in their public housing...

The foreword says it all; it is written by the main commissioner of London's police who thanks Poyner for his work...see below.