If Foucault discerned the spatial model of the disciplinary society in the prison and panopticon, where deviant behavior was brought into line with normalcy, in the control society, in addition to creating normalising institutions and penetrating the very nature of the body (digital fingerprinting and DNA testing are obvious examples), power invades the entire territory. Airports, streets, public squares, stations, houses, offices, resort villages and sports centres are increasingly subject to widespread and thorough surveillance. No longer targeted, surveillance has become generalised.

The space of flows, both tangible and intangible, is the favoured space where power exercises its control. Occupation of these places is what puts an elite in a position of dominion. If, on the one hand, the elite is able to exchange information and travel faster, on the other hand the majority are denied the universally recognised right of movement and residence. It is from this point of view, from the point of view of controlling flows, that this analysis is conducted.

In order to explode the contradictions of a space of flows whose access is fortified, controlled and monitored, this study will focus on the tangible displacements of bodies in space rather than on the intangible flows of information, finance and goods. An approach that investigates the regimes imposed on movements of bodies in space has the advantage of making the forms of power explicit. This perspective was also suggested by Castells:

The space of flows does not infuse the entire field of human experience in the network society. The vast majority of people in both advanced and traditional societies live in places, and, therefore perceive their own space as a place-based space.

His theory of urbanism in the information age posits that cities are simultaneously structured and destructured by competing logics: the logic of the space of flows on the one hand (which link individual places into a network connecting people and activities in distant geographical locations), and the logic of the space of place (experiences and activities within the confines of the nearby territory) on the other hand. Castells believes that spaces of place are redundant and superfluous in the organisation of the space of flows and power.

This the reason, in Castells view, that they have no capacity per se to construct a critical discourse on contemporary cities and society. Spaces of place are seen as black holes. What happens in them and how they work is not revealed in Castells’s theory.

The point of departure, rather, should be a perspective that comes from within the places where the legal foundations of cities and states are instituted, where relations between the city and its inhabitants are created, where the borders between a territory and a people are established. These are the spaces of exception, places that are anything but marginal to understanding how power is exercised over space.

In my analysis of the spatial form of the archipelago-enclave , I stated that the territorial model of the Occupied Territories is based precisely on controlling the rights of movement and residence. The archipelago-enclave model has put into crisis the notion of citizenship which had defined the political relationship of the individual with the city ever since the classical age.

In the era of globalisation, citizenship is no longer a factor of inclusion and equality that goes beyond religious and racial belonging. It has become an element of exclusion and discrimination, the device an elite uses to manage global flows of people, in complete contradiction with the proclaimed universality and equality of the so-called fundamental rights, especially those of freedom of movement and residence. Inclusion-exclusion and connection-disconnection are logics according to which cities were constructed and continue to be constructed.

Disconnection

From the perspective of control over infrastructure network flows, while these methods act to reinforce connections, they are also the instrument by which entire parts of territories and populations are controlled, filtered and segregated. A space of mobility and flows for some always implies the existence of barriers for others. The creation of an infrastructure network presupposes a more or less conscious spatial and social ideology.

Disconnection from the networks generates a fragmented territory consisting of a set of separate, isolated enclaves that are segregated and suspended. The infrastructure network is the element that serves to enhance the connection of some and the disconnection of others. This apparently banal feature has been underestimated by modernist urban planners, for whom modern infrastructure networks were the support for a harmonious spatial and social order. In their conception, the modern infrastructure network swept away the old hierarchies and founded a new, standardised social order. The use of the automobile in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, for example, allowing residents to move around in the boundless City-Region, was a genuine vehicle of freedom.

The road network, and the electric, water, sewer and communication grids were imagined to reach everyone in the same manner and at the same cost. The virtually standardised and uniform modernist infrastructure was constructed by the state in the collective interest. This ideology, which in some ways continues to survive even today, was put into crisis by two factors: on the one hand, the inadequacy of the rational paradigm, including planning, which was too rigid and bureaucratic to include the new dynamics of the urban agglomerations; on the other hand, the privatisation of the infrastructure networks, aimed at connecting the most affluent and most lucrative islands.

This is the process of infrastructural subdivision and spatial fragmentation that Graham and Marvin described as ‘splintering urbanism’. This process, begun in the 1970s, has by now transformed a large number of cities. New urban areas such as shopping centres, amusement parks, residential complexes, airports, conference centres and resort villages are connected through a selective infrastructure network capable of forming an autonomous, privatised space, putting the notion of public space and the very idea of city into crisis. The concept of bypassing is fundamental for understanding how disconnection functions in the spatial model of the Occupied Territories.