by hand

CONTROL (Power is the greatest town-planner (Vaneigem, 1967:chpt10))

“A city must rise, to house all the birds; then you must fence in the air, the sky, the earth, and surround it by walls…..” (Aristophanes, ‘The Birds’ (414 BC))[1]

We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops – the geometry (Raoul Vaneigem in Gray, 1998:26).

“The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill” (Deleuze. 1992:7)

All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external (Ellul, 1964:429) – → The abstract, faceless conquest of Space by Man (capitalized) → the limitation of place for men (in small letters) (Ellul, 1964:328) → the breakdown of personality, the stunting of development, the cultivation of fear, suspicion, and hatred (Lynch, 1984:364). Our city illness has a basic motive (Lynch, 1984:364), a common denominator; A single mechanism by which it most disturbs urbanites. This is the loss of control. Crowding, noise, pollution, strip malls, financial ghettos (Bruce Sterling) and ghost malls and arcades; the urbanization of time through increasingly efficient teletechnologies (Virilio, 1993), whatever. They’re all the same thing. A passenger with no control over the machine, it is not possible to experience it as an extension of your organic powers (Tuan, 1977:54). The message is clear: “You cannot do as you please; your actions do not make any difference” (Krupat, 1985:201). And if there has to be a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with (Ronald Regan[2]).

[1] Quoted in Zerzan (2008a). See refs: Aristophanes (414 BC).

[2] Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle in response to protests when the People’s Park in Berkeley was fenced off by police and the National Guard (in McKay (2011:120)).