1.1.
Volume 38 The Shape of Law Table of Contents
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‘It’s legal, but is it legitimate?’ and ‘it’s legitimate, but is it legal?’ These are questions rarely discussed in public concerning architecture and urban design. Yet architects have to deal with rules and regulations, and architecture is to a large extent defined by them. So the question is: how to deal with the law? Throughout the pages of this issue, we’ve explored different strategies for dealing with legal problems, whether that be through a direct fight or indirect action, through avoiding, subverting or changing the law. Because in the end law is too important to be left to lawyers.
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1.2. Editorial Arjen Oosterman and Brendan Cormier
How to Deal (with the Law) Brendan Cormier
2.0. Legitimate Rights 2.1. Before the Law Guillermo López 2.2. The Housing Act Daniel Fernández Pascual 2.3. Re-Righting Ownership Ada Colau interview 2.4. Don’t Stare So Romantically Dubravka Sekuli´ c 2.5. Life by Architecture Jordan Carver
How to Deal Make it legible 3.0. Regulating Taste 3.1. Taste Is Law
Jason Griffiths 3.2. Emperor’s New Housing
&\also Hawkins\Brown 3.3. A Green Belt’s Design Charles Holland, David Knight, Finn Williams
How to Deal Exploit the limitations 4.0. Territorial Claims 4.1. The Language of Secret Proof Nina Valerie Kolowratnik 4.2. The Counter-Map and the Territory Nabil Ahmed
How to Deal Profit from a loophole
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64 68 72 74 80 82 86 88 94 96 100 106 112 114 120 126 128 132 134 138 144
4.3. Undivided States of Curaçao Sofia Saavedra Bruno 4.4. Semi-Citizens of Taipei Ying Tzu Lin
How to Deal Use a macguffin 5.0. A Space Beyond the Law 5.1. Extraterritorial Sites of Globalism: A Guide Matt Johnson
How to Deal Crowd-source the input 5.2. The Law Turned into Walls Léopold Lambert 5.3. Unaccountable at the Top René Boer 5.4. In the Name of Peace Malkit Shoshan
How to Deal Force a case 6.0. Control or Release 6.1. The Burdens of Overregulation Pedro Gadanho 6.2. Should We Patent Architectural Knowledge Fake Industries Architectural Agonism 6.3. Rules for Freedom Winy Maas interview
How to Deal Plan for protest 6.4. Seoul Rules Bart Reuser / NEXT architects 6.5. Liquor Law Urbanism A conversation with Craig Allchin
How to Deal Ignore the law 7.0. Disruptions 7.1. Do Not Take Me as the Norm Paula V. Álvarez 7.2. Liberal Art Arjen Oosterman 7.3. Just Joking Liam Ross 7.4. 3D Printing an Empty Space in the Law Louise Shannon Colophon
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1.2.
Law on the Line
Let’s talk about law and faith. The law requires a certain faith – faith that it will perform in our collective best interest. Last year in particular, it was easy to lose that faith. Several high-profile cases brought to light incongruities in our judicial systems that unduly exonerated some, while persecuting others. Take the case of Wall Street. Following the 2008 crash, the US government put together its best legal team to root out what went wrong and who were the culprits. In a case where rapacious greed and gross misconduct were clearly at play, the government failed to prosecute a single major banker. Or look to the cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman. Using Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law, lawyers were able to justify the raciallycharged murder of a defenseless boy. Then there’s Guantanamo Bay, a prison run by the ‘most democratic nation’ in the world, still holding people stripped of their rights. All of this is technically legal. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, we witnessed several watchdogs, activists, and whistle blowers punished for their attempts to bring such injustices to light. As we speak Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is still stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London; Edward Snowden is desperately searching for asylum in any country that will take him; and members of the punk band Pussy Riot endured grueling days and nights in a Russian gulag. To put it in movie terms, it seems that the bad guys are winning, and the good guys are all in jail. So what good is the law? As usual with these matters, we run the risk of straying too far from architecture. But the law is an
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inherently spatial affair; it conditions not only our behavior but also the spaces we build. Think of the balcony at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange was able to deliver a press conference. In this case, architecture via the law, created a podium for a wanted man to speak. Or look at the transit zone at Sheremetyevo airport where Snowden was able to plot his next move, without technically stepping foot on Russian soil. These are exceptional cases, to be fair. Far more banal yet arguably more impactful, is the long list of rules an architect must abide by to run a successful practice. Procurement processes, professional certification, liability insurance, copyrights and patents – dull for sure – but it all restricts what an architect can do. Furthermore it incites the specter of litigation, the death knell for any small practice. And the regulations keep coming – over the last decades, architectural practice has heaped on more codes and protocols to both protect itself but also restrict its agency. Then there are the laws that define what gets built, mostly well-intentioned rules designed for safety and well-being: maximum heights, fire codes, setbacks, etc. But the slow pace at which the laws change, insure that some absurdities remain – for instance a British standard that mandates all windows be a height and size cleanable by a 65 year-old woman. These local peculiarities stick out when an architect travels abroad and sees the absence of regulations in similar situations. For the globally ambitious architect, such laws become a thorn in the side, seen increasingly as parochial in a globalized world.
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Arjen Oosterman and Brendan Cormier
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Furthermore when engineering and new digital production can create impossible architectural forms, the law remains the limiting factor. At a broader level, architecture is dictated by the laws that shape society, and in turn the kinds of commissions being offered. For instance, in a nation that legally promotes home ownership, but also allows for extreme income disparities, the demand for luxury villas will far outweigh that for public housing. For the socially-minded architect, this, of course, causes friction. How does an architect, with an ambition to create open democratic spaces, deal with the anti-homosexual laws of Uganda, or the abortion laws of Ireland, or slave labor in Qatar? Perhaps most alarming, which the case of Guantanamo Bay makes clear, is that there is an outside to the law. Law is not all pervasive. When civil law stops, military law doesn’t simply take over. The most alarming is not a lack of law, but the discovery that ‘outside’ can coexist with ‘inside’. That the legal system can declare moments, places, and individuals as being outside when it chooses to. The right of exclusion. At this point we might all throw our hands up, and give in. For the law has the look and posture of an immovable beast. But noisily giving up is an adolescent attitude. While the law might be obstinate, it isn’t static, and a mature position is to look at how to ultimately change it rather than simply deny it. For instance, the other day it was reported that the eighty-five richest people in the world owned about as much wealth as the poorest fifty percent. A terrible statistic, but that didn’t just happen overnight.
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It was created through decades of lobbying for laws that favored the one percent, through the creation of special zones of exception, through disingenuous rhetoric of trickle-down and freedom. To give a negative picture some light, history is marked by the many great figures and movements that have successfully fought for rights and legislation to improve society. We’ve come a long way. And that fight continues with countless NGOs and organizations trying to tackle contemporary social problems. Architects need to steal a page from their playbook. They have a toolset to work with, to expose, subvert, by-pass and even ignore the law. Or create new facts on the ground, changing the law by consequence. In the end, architecture is not just about making good buildings; it’s about insuring that the proper conditions exist to make good buildings.
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How to deal (with the law) Every day, we deal with the law; mostly by choos ing to abide. But despite its outward appearance, the law is nowhere near as hard and fast as we think. Between breaking and observing the law, there are a million shades of legality. Learning to deal with the law in new ways is a form of creativity seldom practiced in architecture. But if we wade into these murky judicial waters, we might just open up new opportunities and poten tial for the practice. Throughout these pages, we’ve inserted different strategies for dealing with legal problems, whether that be through a direct fight or indirect action. We all know architecture without architects. Now let’s turn the tables and become better legal agents: the law without lawyers.
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2.0. Legitimate Rights
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Photo: Andrea Ciambra
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Laws helped create Spain’s worst housing crisis in history. Ada Colau wants new laws to fix it.
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2.3.
Re-Righting Ownership Ada Colau in conversation with Quaderns (Anna Puigjaner, Guillermo López, José Zabala, and Ethel Baraona Pohl) Ada Colau is not an architect, she’s an activist trained in philosophy at the Barcelona University, but she has done for architecture more than what is thinkable for some practitioners in our field. Founder of Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca [PAH], a Spanish grassroots organization that campaigns for the right to a home, they have succeeded to process what we know as an ILP (a citizen initiative) to propose that government develop a new mortgage legislation. This ILP, backed with 1,402,845 signatures from citizens, proposes the regulation of three key aspects to guarantee housing rights. Due to all this work, in January 2013, the PAH was awarded the European Citizens’ Prize. In this interview, we talk with Ada Colau about how to confront the law in order to find feasible solutions and legal ways to improve our current housing situation.
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Quaderns Before discussing the future of housing, we would like to hear your thoughts about the current situation in Spain. How do you interpret its recent history? Can we come up with some useful conclusions? Ada Colau If we want to focus on where to go, first we
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need to make it clear what the mistakes until now have been. In 2006, at the peak of the real estate bubble, there was no discussion at all about housing, it was not a main topic in politics nor in the mass media. Apparently, the Spanish housing model was supposed to be exempla ry and it was even intended to be exported abroad as a model of growth. It was the so-called ‘Spanish miracle’ regarding the building industry and access to housing. It was basically focused on private property, a situation that seemingly favored not only high-income families but as well low-income citizens, who could easily get mort gages in order to own their properties and in the future leave them in bequest to their families. But there was a contradiction that remained unex plained, since, due to the rise of housing prices, it was becoming increasingly difficult to gain access to housing, specifically for young people. And all of that was happen ing in the European country with the most new housing built in the past decade. Q It is evident that there is no coherence between the overproduction of housing and the access to housing. Can you tell us why? AC We knew there was a housing bubble and that virtually the only way to have access to housing was through private property and therefore by becoming indebted. Despite this, the government still denied the bubble, and entrepreneurs and pundits continued to
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be invited by different media in order to defend their own position. With this capitalist approach inherited from the Reagan-Thatcher era, everyone was intended to win. Everyone was able, by means of credit and mortgages, to have as much private property as they wished. But nobody established the difference between those who bought their house to live there and those who bought properties in order to speculate with them. This is what happened and it affected the working class people most. Q To what extent can legislation influence all this process? AC The government of Spain has ratified all interna tional treaties that guarantee the right to housing and the obligation to build public housing. This is perfectly reflected in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as in the remarks made by the Committee of the United Nations. In the Spanish Constitution, the famous Article 47 states that the State and public authorities are not only obliged to ensure access to a home, but should also prevent speculation. Whereas, in reality they have allowed speculation and encouraged it more than anyone else; in the same vein the capital gains obtained through urban planning should have been reinvested in society, which has systematically not happened. However, it is important to know that a regulatory framework exists. Article 33 of the Spanish Constitution, for instance, deals with the right to private property, establishing limits in order to assure the public inter est. In the same way that you can not have a forest and burn it or you can not contaminate a river crossing your land, because it undermines everyone’s rights and goes
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Photo: Texas Tribune
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In the Texas legislature, architecture became an ideological vehicle for a war on abortion.
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2.5.
Life by Architecture Jordan Carver
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The shrewdest demonstrations of political creativity are those examples where a general rule is being used to change a situation without even mentioning it. In the state of Texas, abortion practice is seriously restricted by introducing new safety and health rules, using space as a prohibitive factor. Space is politics.
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Despite a heroic filibuster by state senator Wendy Davis, on July 18th of this year, the Texas state legislature passed (and Governor Rick Perry signed into law) one of the most restrictive abortion laws in US history. As most of the media coverage has reported, the bill operates on three different and distinct scales: from the body to the city. The law, House Bill 2, restricts access to an abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy, requires doctors to have admitting privileges to a hospital within thirty miles of where they perform abortions, and mandates all abortion clinics meet standards set for ‘ambulatory surgical centers’. The first measure, covered in section one of the bill, is constructed from standard ‘pro-life’ language, restricting temporal access to abortion services and claiming the fetus’ capability of pain – tactics whereby the constitutionality of the bill can be openly questioned, pressing it towards a supreme court showdown where it is hoped sympathetic judges will simply overturn Roe v. Wade and solve the whole mess for good. Certainly, these are topics of interest, but best left for others to investigate. The other two points mark a clear evolution in pro-life thinking. They are a clever – if ironic – blending of religious-conservative positions with an embrace of the state’s social mandate to protect public health, with the goal being the institutionalization of specific religious tenets into secular law. It also marks a bizarre reversal where the traditi onal, conservative anti-regulation sentiments of the right are dropped, and bureaucratic regulation by the state is fully embraced. With House Bill 2, health care facility regulations defined by the state are fully mobilized as a degenerative tool specifically deployed to overburden women’s health clinics out of existence. Or, to reverse
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the equation again, it elegantly confirms the axiom that excessive regulation will force businesses to close their doors rather than face the expense of meeting new standards and go through the tedious process of certification. The specific use of targeting the physical design of clinic facilities and their spatial relationship to hospitals as a means to restrict access to abortion is a tactic known as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP). According to the Guttmacher Institute, the use of TRAP procedures has been around since Roe v. Wade was first decided in 1973 although the tactic has been used increasingly since 2010.1 With an implicit nod to Texas’ much-celebrated wide open spaces, the bill mandates that, “A physician performing or inducing an abortion: (1) must, on the date the abortion is performed or induced, have active admitting privileges at a hospital that: (A) is located not further than thirty miles from the location at which the abortion is performed or induced[.]”2 Laws regulating spatial distances for admitting privileges have been passed in eight other states although less than 0.5 percent of abortions have complications requiring hospitalization.3 In practice, the law places the jurisdiction of abortion services largely within urban settings and gives the hospitals veto power on which doctors they admit or not. Hospitals with religious charters or other aversions to abortion practices, such as Catholic hospitals, are allowed to deny doctors admitting privileges not necessarily based on professional qualifications. While the thirty-mile admittance requirement certainly restricts the administration of abortion services to parts of the state with already established hospitals – and almost by definition – more developed areas, it is
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Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca – Claude Lorrain 1648
“Romanticism promotes the abandonment of social convention” Elizabeth Barlow Rogers “Lakes in a placid and sinuous outline” E.B.R. “The mountain and the deep gloomy woods” E.B.R. Middle ground occupied partial ruin and background distant sublime nature.
The Lakes Community Association Rules “Natural or earth colored stone may be used in conjunction with grass” General Rules: Rule #5
“It is the intention of the LCA to ensure that the overall landscaping theme is a well-maintained lush green, which has made The Lakes Community uniquely appealing to property owners.” General Rules: Rule #5
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“8. Special activity: Those activities involving members, with management approval, which may include guests and invitees and may require reservation of selected common areas and facilities.” A. Defintions: The Lakes Community Association Rules and Regulations
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3.1.
El Rio de Luz – Frederic Edwin Church
“the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power, ... how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling? It is like trying to paint a soul” - Ruskin describes the ‘truth of water’. E.B.R
A distant canoeist at daybreak in the tropical rainforest. Botanical studies of flora and fauna from 1857 trip to South America
The Lakes Community Association Rules “Palm Trees shall be planted no closer than 5 feet to the Lake wall.” Trees & Lake Wall: Rule #5: Landscaping
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“1.3 Canoes and kayaks shall be no longer than 18 feet.” Boating Rules. Watercraft Allowed.
“LAKEFRONT EASEMENT: Each lakefront lot contains a 40 foot easement in favor of the LCA as measured from the rear lot line inward. This easement extends 25 feet into the lake and 15 feet into the lot measured from the shoreline. This easement is provided to accommodate the operation and maintenance of the lake and lake systems.” Rule #2: Easements and Setbacks
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‘Welcome to Jemez Pueblo. Respect Our Tradition’, banner at entrance of Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, November 12th, 2012.
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Photo: ŠN. Kolowratnik
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Profit from a loophole The good intentions of city plans and ordi nances have been historically subverted by profit seeking forces. Today some of the most recognizable details in our cityscapes stem from unforeseen consequences of rules and the exploitation of their loopholes. Every law has an exception, so consult your ethics and profit where you can. Montreal stairs When Montreal initiated mandatory setbacks on residen tial plots, around the turn of the century, as a way to create more open space, developers profited by putting the staircases outside of their units, freeing up valuable floor space.
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Iceberg homes In London, there are several rules that limit the degree to which you can expand your house. For the super-rich looking to increase their square footage, there is one loophole though: digging down. There is no limit to the number of basement floors a house can have. This has led to ‘iceberg homes’ with multiple basement floors that house private gyms, cinemas, servant quarters, car col lections. Whatever you please; just no windows.
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Photo: Derik Miller
Mansard roofs The iconic mansard roofs of Paris may have just been a way to squeeze in an extra floor. A 1783 law restricted building height across the city to just 20 meters, but counted only from the ground to the top of the cornice. The last floor began after the cornice, and was therefore exempt.
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Unaccountable at the Top René Boer
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Everyone is equal under the law, but is the law applicable to everyone? Well-known is how diplomats cannot be prosecuted outside their own country; their immunity is essential for their job. Harder to accept are the following cases where global organizations aren’t held accountable for consequences of their policies and actions. Knowing you did something wrong is not enough.
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UN MINUSTAH Port-au-Prince, Haiti UN troops in Haiti are accused of causing the biggest Cholera outbreak in recent times, which killed more than 8,000 and affected more than 600,000. UN staff also shot at least five protesters in Port-au-Prince during riots related to the outbreak. At first, the UN denied responsibility for the epidemic, but was later pressured to start an investigation. The results confirmed evidence UN troops were to blame, but concluded that the outbreak was related to a ‘confluence of circumstances’. The UN subsequently appealed for $160 million to fight further spread of the disease. In 2012 the victims filed a lawsuit against the UN in a US federal court, demanding reparations. In response, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared that the UN has legal immunity according to the ‘Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations’. UNICEF/WORLD BANK Dhaka, Bangladesh At the end of Bangladesh’ civil war in the early 70s, the country had one of the worst infant mortality rates due to a lack of safe drinking water. In response, UNICEF started a large-scale tube well construction program, funded by the World Bank. In the 90s an outbreak of various skin diseases appeared to be related to arsenic found in some of the wells. Soon after, it was discovered that up to 80 million people were sourcing their drinking water from contaminated wells built through the UNICEF program. The World Health Organization has called it the ‘largest mass poisoning in history’ possibly killing tens of thousands. UNICEF initially denied but later acknowledged their share in the mass poisoning. The UN embarked on a large-scale arsenic mitigation program in collaboration with the Government of Bangladesh, funded interest-free by the World Bank. Affected slum dwellers in Dhaka have prepared lawsuits against UNICEF and the British Geological Survey, which helped install the tube wells, but no actual trials have taken place. IMF Athens, Greece In 2013 the International Monetary Fund admitted that their interventions in the Greek economy from 2010 onwards severely aggravated the ongoing economic crisis in the country. The combination of the deepening crisis and the austerity packages, which form a major part of the foreign interventions, led to ‘nightmare’ unemployment levels among the inhabitants of Athens. As the austerity measures also took away most of the social
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security programs, rising unemployment directly forced thousands out of their homes. As a result, homelessness has peaked in the last few years and currently it is estimated that tens of thousands are sleeping on the streets of Athens. Various European Members of Parliament have announced to conduct an investigation into the operations of the IMF in the last three years in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, as the IMF is accountable to the governments of its member states. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Dadaab, Kenya Various improvised refugee camps were set up near the small Kenyan town of Dadaab by Somalians fleeing the civil war that started in 1991. UNHCR intervened and took responsibility for the management of the camps that grew as the civil war continued. Currently there are more than 500,000 refugees in camps around Dadaab, making it Kenya’s third largest city. While UNHCR is certainly working under difficult conditions, camp’ inhabitants, researchers and aid experts argue that UNHCR has failed to guarantee basic living conditions. Currently, thousands lack access to basic health care, water, and adequate shelter. Most children are not able to go to school and new arrivals are denied entry, leaving them in ‘informal’ camps outside the fences. UNHCR has been accused of forcibly restricting movement of refugees, maintaining exploitative working conditions, and providing false information on service delivery. No serious, independent investigation of the work of UNHCR in Dadaab has been carried out so far. FIFA & IOC Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Rio de Janeiro is about to receive two of the world’s biggest sporting events. In 2014, the FIFA World Cup and in 2016 the Olympic Games. The authorities see both events as catalysts for improving Brazil’s and Rio’s image to the world, and embarked on a large-scale urban restructuring scheme to modernize and sanitize the city. In all the plans related to the current urban transformation more than 130 favela areas have been marked for demolition. Currently, more than 10,000 people have already been displaced and many more are to follow. Dissatisfaction with these policies has fueled a wave of protests that started in the summer of 2013 and is still ongoing. Many organizations, among others the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, have criticized FIFA, the IOC and the local authorities for not taking into account basic human rights in the preparations of the events.
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In justifying their drone strike operations as ‘self-defense from immanent threat’, the US has dramatically expanded the definition of what immanence actually means. One doesn’t need to be responding to an immediate direct threat, but that imminence would include striking someone who we know or believe is a member of an armed group, and may pose some threat, even if ill-defined, at some point in the future.
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The US considers all of their drone strikes as legal self-defense.
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5.4.
In the Name of Peace: Another Civic, An Other Law Malkit Shoshan
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Since 2001 we know that law is not universal, that states can unilaterally declare persons and situations extra-legal. Until recently this new reality was confined to spaces of exception, but with the introduction of drones and other technologies for digital warfare, extra-legal space has become liquid. Has legal space become the exception?
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“If I am walking in the market, I have this fear that maybe the person walking next to me is going to be a target of the drone. If I’m shopping, I’m really careful and scared. If I’m standing on the road and there is a car parked next to me, I never know if that is going to be the target. Maybe they will target the car in front of me or behind me. Even in mosques, if we’re praying, we’re worried that maybe one per son who is standing with us praying is wanted. So, wherever we are, we have this fear of drones.” – Safdar Dawar1 Over the past decades, and intensifying after 9/11, we have witnessed a growing process of militarization worldwide, titled as ‘conflict prevention’, ‘peace support’, ‘peacekeeping’, ‘peace enforcement’ and ‘peace building’. These international missions and operations are expanding the territorial hold of Western forces (namely NATO, the UN, and US grand operations that are mostly backed by the UN), in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, and the Maghreb. These operations are the present and future of war and warfare; and they are taking place in ordinary civic environments. The footprint of these missions and the transition to the civic realm is, among other things, architectural. Buildings and roads are made to house foreigners (including military bases); to improve the local law-enforcement agencies, such as police stations and prisons; and to empower the local population by providing basic civic amenities such as schools, roads, homes, and so on. Within the context of this topic, the laws and regulations that define civic space, it is interesting to look
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at the actions that are being taken to break down and dismantle that same civic space in order to rebuild and reconstruct it differently. The COIN doctrine In October 2008, an essay was published in The Atlantic, under the title ‘The Petraeus Doctrine’2 which described transitions in warfare and in the goal of war. The new warfare is not only about coercion but about social engineering. As Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl has claimed, as the security challenges of the twenty-first century increase, this new integrated military-civic approach in warfare will require the US military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”3 There are two warfare doctrines complicit in this strategy. The first is a conventional military operation called the COIN doctrine. The second is an unmanned version of the first. COIN4 stands for the counterinsurgency operation that is aimed at eliminating the influence of threat in a selected area. The goal of COIN is to produce relatively safe territories that could be subject to reconstruction. These territories are named Ink Blots – zones of relative security that slowly expand and link to each other in order to form territorial continuity. According to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs5 the operational approach of COIN has four distinctive phases: Shape Phase is aimed at mapping the local area, weakening existing threats, building a ring of security around the area, and at the same time preparing the population for the arrival of the peace-enforcement and reconstruction forces.
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Plan for protest Good old-fashioned protest. Some of the greatest legal reform was created through the violence and obstinacy of taking to the streets. Another thing about protests: they occupy space, raising the question: Could such a spatial affair be improved by architects? That’s the assumption Planning for Protest makes – an exhibition put on at the 2013 Lisbon Triennale of Architecture and organized by Ben Allen, James Bae, Ricardo Gomes. Shannon Harvey and Adam Michaels – as it invited twelve studios to re-think how protest could take place in their respective cities. www.planningforprotest.org
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Athens Protocols Antonas Office imagined a series of spaces in Athens that could provide the necessary spatial and digital tools to formulate civic legislation. One such space, Syntagma Square creates an alternative parliament, ruled by means of the Internet; Athens becomes a node of an international system of infrastructures. The proposed steps on the square host long tables provided with power and access to the Internet. The Square serves as an open call for proposals of new urban protocols, applications to be used by the inhabitants of a city block or other ad hoc groups.
Photo: Antonas Office
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1
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Team: Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy) with Ronan O’Boyle, Caoimhe Merrick, John McLaughlin and Peter Tansey / Drawing by Ronan O’Boyle
Built city edge taken from the John Tallis Map of 1856.
Samuel Beckett Bridge: One of many bridges in Dublin named after famous male literary figures. Completed in 2009.
The Anglo Building: Unfinished multi storey building designed as headquarters for the now defunct Anglo Irish Bank. Anglo was nationalised in 2009. In 2011, the Central Bank of Ireland bought this concrete shell, a failed development which had become an icon of the economic crash in Ireland. The Central Bank plans to relocate their headquarters from the city centre to this docklands location, although no architectural proposal has yet been publicised.
Google Headquarters: ‘Located in the heart of the historic dockyards district (a.k.a. Silicon Dock), Google has helped put Dublin on the map as a technology hub in Europe’. The office has thousands of employees from over 65 countries, overseeing sales and infrastructure for their businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Matheson: An Irish law firm specialising in providing corporate secretarial services to international companies and financial institutions. Official trading address for nearly 800 companies.
The Treasury Building: Home of NAMA (National Assets Management Agency) set up to manage the assets of nationalised banks, including many half-built residential and commercial property developments. Previously home to Treasury Holdings, one of the largest property development companies, which was liquidated in 2012 owing c.1.7 billion euro to NAMA.
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Hiding in Plain Sight Public protest in Ireland most often takes the form of a march along a predetermined route. The city’s architec ture creates a symbolic backdrop for the moving mass of demonstrators. Culturstruction propose a new ‘Route of Civic Dissent’ that makes visible the connections between state and marketplace and directly addresses Ireland’s most recent history of corrupt banks, market driven policies, and the entanglement of governance and private capital in Ireland’s route from boom to bust.
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