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November 17, 2008

BLDG Blog: a lecture on feral cities

For those who happen to be in London on November 26. Geoff Manaugh of the amazing BLDGBLOG together with Antoine Bousquet of Birkbeck College will present a public lecture on 'Battlespace/s: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare'. Manaugh's lecture will be an analysis on 'cities gone wild'; I encourage people who are interested in BLDGBLOG and Manaugh's fascinating researches regarding war, architecture, science fiction and geopolytics to attend this lecture. Manaugh will also discuss his topics through references to J. G. Ballard, Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land and Cyclonopedia.

"[Colonel] West frequently mentions that the urbanist militia is adept in reprogramming the city as the very object of war, a portal to the end of the pipeline for the Jihadi militia. In the Middle East, urban planning is based on the anticipation of an urbanized war. 'The claustrophobic or anomalous construction of cities such as Karachi, Tehran and Dubai is not merely a symptom of mismanagement or hysteria caused by overabundant oil money,' West notes, 'for such cities think ahead of time when it comes to war. Their construction, connected buildings and overpopulation are premeditations on war. Apart from sporadic examples, architecture in the Middle East is either a hokey imitation of the west or a profusely militarized masonry. Every brick either provokes the jihadi and enlightens his rage or secures his path to the desert.' In the wake of urbanized war, the population itself becomes the steadiest military trench: each civilian in itself a hide-out and a weapons stash for the militia." (Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials)

For more information see here and here.

Posted by Incognitum at November 17, 2008 06:52 AM