Canyon Cities (Detroit, Oakland, Paris) by Léopold Lambert (2015) / Download them here in high resolution (license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 4.0)

In a recent article entitled “Power Is Logistic: Let’s Shut Down Everything“, I was evoking The Invisible Committee‘s argument according to which sovereign power was now exercised through infrastructure. We were then evoking the various fluxes of bodies, goods and capitals as the vital fluid of a political-economic sovereignty; what we did not examine back then, nevertheless, was the ability for infrastructure, while facilitating some means of communications, to greatly prevents movement in the ‘perpendicularity’ of its axes. Urban highways are thus exemplary of how the infrastructural means of maximizing a movement between the city and its suburbs, simultaneously minimize the movement internal to the same city. Urban populations, in particular the lowest social classes that do not necessarily own a car, find themselves deprived from their “right to the city,” trapped by these axes of segregation cutting the urban fabric like canyons. Whether the municipal intentions were (and still are) to actually segregate these populations through this infrastructure or not, is irrelevant, since the latter’s effects are well-known, and the absence of decision to this matter make mayors and their teams politically responsible for them.

A bit less than a month ago, the University of Oklahoma released aerial photographs of several American Mid-West cities (St Louis, Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, and more) showing the urban impact of this highway system: photographs from the 1950s are superimposed to recent ones, illustrating precisely the changes operated in the last sixty years. For the purpose of this article, I won’t even evoke the massive policy of eminent domain that must have operated back then to build these highways in the middle of relatively dense cities, and the more or less negotiated evictions that followed. We could however stay within a historical perspective and consider (one more time) how the American highway system found its political paroxysm through the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act conceived by the Einsenhower administration (see the article “From the Highway to the Pill: Counter-History of the American Suburbia” for instance), which, as its name indicate, was as much a civil as a military infrastructural project. Among other objectives briefly explained in the lastly cited article, the highways were designed and built to be potentially militarized, used for maximizing the US army movement in case of a Soviet invasion — a massive suppression against students, workers and minorities was probably more likely to happen — as well as to allow military aircraft to land if necessary. Admittedly, these last points do not address the canyons formed by the urban highways but, as usual, it seems appropriate to recall the explicit part of military essence in all forms of design.......Continue Reading

> via The Funambulist