Architecture, sinon repression: a journey through the narrow layer where the State meets the land

Oropallo, Gabriele (2011) Architecture, sinon repression: a journey through the narrow layer where the State meets the land. In: Standing on the Beach with a Gun in My Hand. Blackjack éditions, Paris, pp. 71-75. ISBN 9782918063193

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Abstract / Description

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari recounted how the definition of space is historically the result of an extended confrontation between two arrangements of its raw material, the smooth and the striated. Smooth does not stand for homogeneous. Rather, it means amorphous, formless. Striation is the result of the intervention of man who, while colonising a territory, drew lines on it like on a wax tablet. This intervention progressively created homogeneity and facilitated movement through the territory. One should think of a grid that allows one to measure discrete distances, or a network of roads that allows navigation through the land. One of the oldest continuously anthropised territories on the planet, the Fertile Crescent has undergone a radical process of redefinition of boundaries since the end of the First World War and the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire. On the Mediterranean end of the crescent, colonisation and redefinition have been extensive, but pockets of old fragments of the mutilated previous space, already parcelled and moulded in a slow process over the centuries, still remain.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	architecture, urban space, politics of space, colonisation, decolonisation
Subjects:	300 Social sciences > 320 Political science 600 Technology > 690 Buildings 700 The arts; fine & decorative arts > 720 Architecture
Department:	The School of Art, Architecture and Design
Depositing User:	Gabriele Oropallo
Date Deposited:	02 Nov 2020 12:01
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2020 12:01
URI:	https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/id/eprint/6151

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