URBAN LABORATORY PART 01: GAZA

Urban conflict and the spatial dynamics of innovation environments

Much of the rhetoric around creative economies in contemporary urban discourse focuses on the term ‘innovation’. The term is one of all those debased concepts that litter literature in any number of fields, not least of which in the education sector of which I am also a part. My point here is not to go into the myriad problems raised by this term such as the idea of  ‘metrics’ that can quantify innovation (based on patents for example) or the spatial banality of much of what passes for its architectural or urban articulation in campus and research facilities, but to broach a more difficult and less comfortable aspect of the relation between an environment and creativity that centers on the notion of conflict. The notes that follow are just some initial thoughts prompted by a talk I gave at the Shenzhen University School of Urban Planning and Architecture last year and reading Jonathan Cook’s ‘Disappearing Palestine’ earlier this year. The presentation in Shenzhen tried to locate some of my work in regards to both conflict and creativity as such, and to make some claims for their often intimate relation in way that suspended both the moral condemnation of one and the blind enthusiasm for the other. Disappearing Palestine and some other related titles, began to account for these phenemona of conflict and creativity with regards to the ’situation in Gaza’ as they say and so some of this was also expanded on for the recent talk I gave at Red-R and ASF in London .

To start with, the categories we use to judge conflict are usually moral categories, it is good (we support it) or it is bad (we oppose it), but I want to argue that if we suspend the desire to produce immediate judgment, even if this judgment must and should return later, I think what we find is that conflict is central to the production of forms of creativity. Similarly, when I say creativity I don’t think creativity is inherently positive in any moral sense either – quite monstrous things occupy the most creative of minds. Moral categories of judgment cannot be applied to either term,  more than this however, the terms cannot be separated. There is no creation of any sort without both force and resistance, which is to say that creativity emerges from conflict.

The claim I want to make – by way of an attempt at provocation – is to argue that we should not assume – as if by automatic reflex – that conflict is always be resolved. Besides being utopian, it means that we are actually misunderstandings the conditions that we find ourselves in which cooperation and not conflict is actually the exception to the rule. So my thought experiment is to try to see conflict as a mode of creative experimentation and feedback where we try to create the conditions for something to emerge, learn from the process and re-tune the conflict again in a sort of infinite experimental loop. This rather machinic view of conflict as a potentially creative condition in which the fundamental instability of the system in question must be modulated and where non-linear feedback simultaneously threatens to intensify productivity or else tear the system apart is really just a speculative attempt to re-frame some very old questions through a new set of lenses.

What we have today is a situation in Gaza in which Israel has undergone limited withdrawal.  At present, Gaza is an urban prison of unprecedented proportions. The people in Gaza live in a ghetto in which Israel controls all borders, carefully limits the amount of food and medicine that is allowed in, permits no-one from Gaza the opportunity to leave, does not allow foreigners in etc.

The situation in Gaza is kept permanently on the borderline of mass starvation and disease – what Jonathan Cook has called the ‘industrialization of despair’, in which people are being subjected to a mass experiment in modulated deprivation.This experiment takes place in way so as to mainly occupy the bandwidth of conflict that I describe as ‘ambient’, as not spectacular enough to trigger the feedback loops of the world media.As an Israeli Professor  has noted, “There has been no genocide here, no wholesale devastation of territory, no mass rapes, no concentration camps, no mass starvation and no systematic deportation of local residents. There has been no Kosovo or Rwanda here – the sort of situations that arouse the international community to act”, as Cook puts it again, as long as the Israeli occupation “does not too much look like the popular notion of genocide – concentration camps and butchery – Israel will be able to continue its policies unchecked.” (Jonathan Cook, Disappearing Palestine)

This careful tuning of misery is nothing more than a collective experiment on the subjugation and management of a population.

As Yossi Sarid, the former leader of the Meretz Political party in Israel said:

“Gaza is a dream laboratory for experiments on human beings, to discover the precise point when a dependent person transfers from one situation to another – when does he keep up the struggle and when does he become acclimated? Or when is the horse’s breaking point – when does it only continue to lose weight and when does it flop and breathe its last?”

Though it may well be a nightmare of gargantuan proportions for the inhabitants of Gaza, it truly is a dream for the Israeli high tech defense economy which has at its disposable, a well contained laboratory complete with live Arab population on which it can begin to test and rehearse a series of techniques, strategies and technologies which will be exported all over the world at enormous profit. To get a better sense of this industry I want to quickly note that Israeli security technologies, trialled and tested in the occupied territories are now exported across the world, this trade mainly flows to the United States in a post 9/11 security climate and in the form of knowledge and technology that helps fight the Iraqi insurgency, it has also flowed to Brazil to assist in the brutal zero-tolerance measures of the police force in Rio, they are used by the New York Police Department and of course by the home office  in the United Kingdom because the British can’t get enough CCTV. All these security technologies are enabled only because of the live conditions under which they are trialled and tested.

But because these conditions consist of flexible spatial enclosures and shifting determinations of transfer and enclosure and of porosity that all seek to operate under the thresholds of western media feedback and thus international condemnation, it is critical that new skills are brought to bear on the analysis of these situations. These skills will not be the skills we associate with traditional warfare and conflict, they are the skills that can unpack the way an urban situation is used as a tactic to deprive a population of basic human dignity. They are design skills that demand spatial intelligence, but they also demand a cold heart, a cool analytical gaze and a suspension of outrage.