out of place

Out of touch. Out of sight, ought of mind.

Previously the barbarian had always been recognisable, always hovering around the city gates, menacingly. But now, who is to say what is inner and what is outer? We live cheek by jowl with strangers and there is no place to where we could expel and confine 'the other'..we're running out of wastelands. From now on we will have to exclude the undesirables from within the city walls. The exclusion of the underclass is one template for this, one way of making the poor invisible. Millions of people may live in slum conditions in Karachi but if you live in 'Defence' chances are you will be shocked to learn that such places really exist, that people who look like us, who speak the same words for loving kindness are, in fact, real people.

How to build a city within a city.

Exclusion zones and CCTV...a surveillance society; the law itself can be used to prevent "anti-social behaviour," keep people from trespassing, strengthen immigration and naturalization laws. Apartheid is only the most blatant form of these interdictory spaces.

Virtually all cities across the world are starting to display spaces and zones that are powerfully connected to other valued spaces across the urban landscape, as well as across national, international and even global distances. At the same, though, there is a palpable and increasing sense of local disconnection in such places from physically close, but socially and economically distant, places and people.

They roam the streets like ghosts, shadows, mirror images of the virtually connected elites. The nightmares of the latter are centred around these steppenwolves: prowlers, stalkers, loiterers, beggars, travellers & gypsies, paedophiles in the community, Islamic radicals ("the Islamic threat"). Be afraid, be very afraid. Car bombs and unknown diseases, dirty bombs. According to Stephen Flusty the paramount concern of urban developers is to bar access to these undesirables, "losers".

Community living. Sure. But who, exactly, is my brother. Across these 'internal moats' one can be excused for thinking there is only Friend and Enemy.
---from Bauman, Liquid Times.

Venice.

The power of the economic contract trumps all and something the State is forced to recognise on pains of overlooking the dominant form of power; even Christian fellowship or fraternity is ineffectual in this regard. Venice is a city of strangers, a floating, shimmering world. Is the intense feeling for community a reaction to weak ties of citizenship?

The Jews represent pollution (a familiar theme in the sordid history of antisemitism). Merchants bow to them when agreeing to a contract rather than face the ignominy of bodily contact: a simple handshake. The market does, indeed, provide for the needs of strangers. The Jew is the stranger to the common (Christian) body. Venice's fear of decline, her self-loathing, is projected on to other people (a message for today, perhaps). The city cannot bind people together any more, the polis is falling away at the seams..only fear and creature comforts can produce that warm glow of belonging now. In 1397 they have to wear yellow badges. In 1416 prostitutes have to wear yellow scarves. Both are polluters and lax morals lead to moral and political decline.

The ghettos. Purity and danger: the old tribal instincts yet again. But from this separation, from within this accursed land, something holy could emerge...
--From Flesh and Stone