Indefensible Space

The Architecture of the National Insecurity State

Michael Sorkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415953689
• eBook ISBN: 9781135925628
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Showing how the upswell of paranoia and growing demand for security in the post-9/11 world has paradoxically created widespread insecurity, these varied essays examine how this anxiety-laden mindset erodes spaces both architectural and personal, encroaching on all aspects of everyday life. Starting from the most literal level—barricades and barriers in front of buildings, beefed up border patrols, gated communities, "safe rooms,"—to more abstract levels—enhanced surveillance at public spaces such as airports, increasing worries about contagion, the psychological predilection for fortified space—the contributors cover the full gamut of securitized public life that is defining the zeitgeist of twenty-first century America

Index

A

Abitidoon, Hassan Gulaid, 101

Abramoff, Jack, 152

Abu Ghraib Detention Facility, 42, 47

Aerial bombardment, 57–58, 328–329

Aerially enforced occupation, 325–326, 329–330

Afghanistan, 11–12

Mujahedin car bombings, 364–365

Soviet war in, 173

terrorist training, 165

African cities, 100–102, 105

commemorations of liberations, 98–99

Islamic Africans in Marseilles, 102–104

Sahelian diaspora culture, 105

social controls, 99

underground/parallel economies, 101, 105–106

U.S. bases, 102

U.S. embassy bombings, 370–371

waiting in, 97–99

Air power, 328–329

Airborne targeted assassinations, See Israeli targeted assassinations

Airborne terrorism threats, 301–302

Aircraft, remotely controlled, See Unmanned aerial vehicles

Airports, 40–41

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, 285, 369–370

Algiers, 357

Allawi, Iyad, 374

Al-Qa'eda

embassy bombings, 370–371

Internet organization, 70

Islamic homeland dialectics, 23

America's Army, 14, 16

Ames, Robert, 362

Ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO)

bombs, 352, 358–359

Amnesty for undocumented workers, 200, 201

Anarchist bombings, 351–352

Anti-Displacement Campaign, 178, 181, 186–187

Antistate state, 142–145, See also State and antistate

Arab Americans, 8–9

Arab cities, U.S. binary imaginative geographies, 1–4, 14

automated surveillance and killing systems, 19–21, 25

construction as terrorist nests, 12–14

“homeland” cities as national security spaces, 4–10

how technology will defeat terrorism, 18–19

Orientalist tropes, 2–3, 10, 24

problems and implications, 23–25

targets for anti-terrorism military strikes, 10–17

terrorist and Bush administration parallel discourses, 23

training and simulation sites, 15–16

victims of war on te...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Fear Factor
• Cities and the ‘War on Terror’
• Empire of the Insensate
• Urban Operations and Network Centric Warfare
• Planet America: Empire's New Land Grab
• Waiting in African Cities
• Border Tours: Strategies of Surveillance, Tactics of Encroachment
• Restating the Obvious
• The Threat from Within: Protecting the Indefensible from the Indeterminate
• Blank Slates and Disaster Zones: The State, September 11, and the Displacement of Chinatown
• Back to Zero: Mourning in America
• The New Emotions of Home: Fear, Insecurity, and Paranoia
• Staged Authenticity Today
• Architecture Emblematic: Hardened Sites and Softened Symbols
• Me and My Monkey: What's Hiding in the Security State
• Thanatotactics
• ‘The Poor Man's Airforce”: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
• Contributor Notes
• Index