Connect – Disconnect

Connection

Contemporary cities and territories have been depicted by many scholars and the media as fluid spaces, without borders, lacking an exterior, and continuously traversed by flows. Interconnected global cities form an autonomous transnational space. There exists a rhetoric and an imaginary tied to globalisation, to the new freedom of movement, and to the elimination of distances made possible by new electronic and mechanical infrastructures.

These representations of the urban and territorial reality seem to literally implode when things fail to go as they are supposed to, when something goes wrong. The system of representation thus plunges into crisis, revealing all its inadequacy and bias. Today, albeit with some effort, a widespread awareness is growing that, parallel to the proliferation of new computer, financial and economic networks, the number of borders, barriers and checkpoints for the protection of the networks is being multiplied.

While flows become ever more intangible, the fortification of the physical space is accelerating. This has created a territorial system in which the archipelago (the smooth space of flows) and the enclave (the spaces of exception) cohabit. These two figures inhabit the same space, but their cohabitation is asymmetrical. On the one hand, we have an elite that is managing the space of flows, living in an archipelago-type world which it perceives as the only world, with no exterior to it; while on the other hand, the suspension of the rules of the archipelago creates legal and economic vacuums that make the enclave system a black hole, a shadowy area.

The archipelago is a system of connected islands; enclaves are simply islands.

The archipelago can accommodate both legal and illegal flows inside its space, whereas enclaves have no type of connection: they are isolated by some kind of power that may be internal or external to them, a power they submit to or which they exert.

There is a substantial difference between being enclosed and enclosing oneself: it is what distinguishes a concentration camp from a luxury community.
In his book The Capsular Civilization, Lieven De Cauter claims that gated communities and immigrant camps or detention centres are mirror images of each other, in the same way tourist areas and ghettos are. The camp is the counterpart of the fortress.

A fortress is an exclusion machine, while a camp is a reclusion machine.

De Cauter thus points out that in order to reflect on cities and territories at the same time, we must think in dual terms: entertainment versus control, opening versus isolation. Connection is what makes archipelagos necessary and possible, while disconnection is what creates enclaves.

A group of islands creates an archipelago when relations, or connecting spaces, exist between one island and another, namely, when a space for the flows exists. Manuel Castells asserts that in contemporary cities this space is constituted by flows of information, organisation, capital, images and symbols; thanks to new communication technologies, this flow is able to generate an integrated global network. For Castells, the space of flows is a form of space capable of shaping new urban conditions and a new type of society, the networked society. This space is governed by the most affluent members of the elite who live in superconnected cities and spaces, from where they exert enormous power.

The space of flows…can be described…by the combination of at least three layers of material supports….The first layer, the first material support of the space of flows is actually constituted by a circuit of electronic impulses (microelectronics, telecommunications, computer processing, broadcasting systems, and high-speed transportation…). …The second layer of the flow space is constituted by its nodes and hubs. The space of flows is not placeless, although its structural logic is….The third important layer of the space of flows refers to the spatial organization of the dominant, managerial elites (rather than classes).

For Castells, the space of flows is the fruit of technological innovations that have allowed people who are geographically distant to participate in shared social practices. His analysis is therefore predominantly centered on intangible flows. From this point of view, the practices of control and segregation that are exerted on the movement of people in the physical space remain marginal.

The theorists of cyberspace believed that access to new technologies would give life to a world with no more borders or barriers, in which bodies would dematerialise into cyberspace. This vision remained a utopia, belied by the dramatic evidence of billions of people who are excluded both from access to the network and from free circulation in a world presumed to be without borders. Quite to the contrary, movements of bodies in physical space have become subject to ironhanded control on the part of government and private entities. The consequences of these developments have yet to be explored. The illusion of a world without fences has been replaced by a reality in which the spaces of freedom have been occupied by an evolving form of power that has traced out the passage, foreseen by Foucault, from a disciplinary society to a society of control. Apropos of this, Deleuze writes:

The control society is a type of society in which mechanisms of control become increasingly “democratic”... The normalizing devices of discipline that act within our shared everyday practices are intensified and generalized in societies of control; unlike disciplinary societies, however, this control extends well beyond the structural places of social institutions by means of a free-floating network.

In societies of control we are continually monitored and our movements are systematically recorded and filed away ‘by means of a free-floating network’: we are all potential criminals.