“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948. Its “Article 13-I” states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.” I can get behind the wheel of my car and drive from coast to coast – not that Ohio and Kansas aren’t surveilling me. The interstate highways may be occasional sites of road rage violence and garbage dumping, but the state feels these violations are ably handled by the booted and belted state police. I am free to move within their narrow corridors.
My freedom of movement coincides nicely with national security requirements. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, creating funds for interstate highway construction. Details for the system specified mile-long stretches of straight pavement — suitable as landing strips for military aircraft. Planners took into consideration the locations of division-level army garrisons. The 1stInfantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas is located adjacent to I-70, and the 1stArmored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas can hit the road at I-10.
From birth, we are assigned to a territory, any one of today’s 203 sovereign states. In his preface to Handbook of Tyranny, Theo Deutinger writes, “The territoriality of laws works as long as citizens remain within the territory to which they are assigned, when registration, visas laws, and travel regulations are taken into account. Yet the link between territory and citizenship can be broken, resulting in refugees and stateless individuals. Currently there are more than 20 million refugees and 10 million stateless people … Theoretically, according to the territoriality of law, these people should not exist, which is why there is no answer to their needs.” A territory can both harbor and hunt for its citizens, visitors, and homeless.
An Austrian architect, writer and designer of socio-cultural maps and studies, Deutinger has invested a decade’s worth of work into meticulously classifying the modes of state physical control around the world. His drawings, charts and displays of data illuminate the daunting variety of structures and strategies of superintendence. Over the past century, technologies have dramatically enhanced the state’s ability to restrain and control people within territorially-assigned spaces. Walls, barriers, fences – Deutinger describes the materials and functionality of different “solutions.” Some techniques are sprawling implementations, such as refugee camps and mega-prisons. He offers renditions of “defensive cities,” sophisticated plans indicating the depth of urban planners’ confidence that political and social crises can be handled and defused with spatial and technical countermoves.
Perhaps most chilling are Deutinger’s six image-packed pages on crowd control. After a brief introduction to the topic, he leads us directly to the technical details considered by event organizers, tourist boards, and police forces – but in a way that both informs and startles a general reader:
Six people per square meter is the threshold at which bodies are jammed so tightly that they begin to behave like a fluid. Pressure waves can travel through them and they can lose control. Yet in most cases, crowd control is not about avoiding a disaster through overcrowding but about avoiding disastrous media coverage. The police also have to watch out since, through the use of smartphones, helmet cameras, and even drones, participants in demonstrations monitor the police continuously. Additionally, feeling safe is at the top of the list for people choosing to visit or live in a specific place. Thus, crowd control is important not only to the masses involved, but much more to the masses not involved but potentially bothered by them.
Handbook of Tyranny includes data bearing on many entrenched American social issues, such as incarceration. In opening remarks to the chapter on prison cells, he notes that there are more than 10 million prisoners worldwide – and a quarter of them are detained in the United States: “Today, on Wall Street, the US prison industry is worth $70 billion. This equates to $32,000 per prisoner which is, cruelly enough, the value of a slave in 1850 (in the equivalent of today’s money).” A chart detailing the average cell size in countries shows that the largest ones are in Switzerland (12.0 square meters, on average) – the smallest in Guinea (2.0 square meters), just slightly more cramped than in Iran (2.3 square meters). The median American cell is 6.5 square meters, the same size as Mexico and Australia.
The border between Mexico and the U.S. is 1,933 miles long, but 34 per cent of that line is already walled off. Mountains and rivers form a natural barrier along most of the rest of the border. Deutinger says, “Walls don’t just appear; they generally replace preexisting fences to reinforce a political conflict. It is highly doubtful that walls are more effective than fences at keeping people out. They do, however, signal to outsiders that they are excluded not only from entering but also from seeing the walled territory.” Trump’s wall exactly, intended as an affront. Conversely, I would add that walls signal to insiders that they are exempted from recognizing the grievous hurts of the outsiders.
To spread Handbook of Tyranny in your lap and absorb the visual shock and textual impact of Deutinger’s diagrams and terse analyses is to gaze upon a global condition. One benefit – we get to move beyond the noise of our own wall dramas and recognize that the movement and constraint of peoples are the main challenges presented to all territories.
Article 13-II of the UDHR states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Deutinger sketches the visa policies of each state — such that we see Germany permits citizens of 159 of the 203 nations to enter with a visa, the U.S. allows citizens from 157 to enter freely, while at the bottom of the list, Iraq opens its gates to 26 countries, and Pakistan to only 25. Then, there is the obscurantism of “terrorist organizations,” listed here in detail — groups with strategies to puncture boundaries that they regard as irrelevant and invalid.
Sometimes the state demolishes rather than erects – such as during ethnic cleansing or the eradication of edifices suggestive of fallen regimes. The low-rise Khrushchevki housing in Moscow is being replaced by high-rise apartments, and “Muscovites sense a secret pact between politicians and the real estate market.” But Deutinger doesn’t stop at coercive space design for humans. He also examines the design of slaughterhouses, sketching how different animals are killed and processed – poultry, cattle, pigs, sheep — and in what numbers. One of his facts – 1.3 billion chicken wings are eaten by Americans during the Super Bowl. Slaughterhouse design, as influenced by Temple Grandin, “encourages animals to move forward in the chute.” His chapters on “green fortresses” and natural barriers illustrate how landscaping and vegetation are employed to confine people – trees, reed grass, prickly plants, vines, bamboo, hedges.
Finally, there is the Camden bench, a piece of public architecture that seems to generate antagonism on purpose, designed to discourage unwanted behaviors (drug dealing, littering, loitering) by discouraging sitting itself. Public benches with armrests are intended to bar sleeping and skate-boarding. There are blue lights installed in public restrooms (since blue light makes veins hard to spot for drug users), high-pitch noise emitters to drive off loitering teens, and paint resistant surfaces to foil graffiti makers.
Despite all of this, Deutinger’s outlook remains optimistic — even while the contents of his book are so dispiriting. He writes, “Today, the territoriality of law and its technical instruments seem to belong to an outdated model which has little place in a globalized world. The internationality which surrounds us daily in the form of clothing sizes, road signs, standardized passports, and digital documents points clearly in the direction of global standards. It seems that we are on our way to becoming global citizens, with the whole world as our territory. We just don’t have a road map yet.”
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[Published by Lars Müller Publishers, March 27, 2018. 164 pages, 987 illustrations, 8.25” x 11.75” format, $30.00 hardcover. Portions of the text were contributed by Brendan McGetrick. Pages from the book appear with the permission of — and were provided by — the publisher.]