Failed Architecture

OPEN CALL: Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons A wall snakes through the West Bank, subjugating Palestinian workers to Israel’s permit regime. Rotterdam’s deportation center warehouses migrants before their expulsion. In Los Angeles, draconian sit/lie bans in public space are justified by camps of temporary sheds, containment zones for the unhoused. Through random checkpoints and arbitrary deportation, Turkey’s temporary protection regulations restrict the movement of migrants. In many Arab countries, the kafala migrant labour system segregates workers — whether into 5m2 maid’s rooms in Beirut, or into labour camps in Qatar. Meanwhile, several US states are building billion-dollar prisons, precipitating a further expansion of the population defined as criminal. Where policy produces a global peripheral class, architecture enforces its control, segregation, and banishment. Prisons, detention centres, borders, walls, fences, checkpoints, surveillance and biometrics: everywhere their presence is intensifying as part of an ever-more complex web of enclosures, as states and private industry accelerate a centuries-long project to dominate the world’s productive forces. While offering a modicum of freedom to a privileged few workers in the world’s urban core, this system depends on the presence of a permanently precarious population including the unhoused, the under-documented, and the currently or formerly incarcerated, whose immiseration represents an attempt to keep them from rebelling while keeping others in check. Meanwhile, a class of outsiders — Mad, sick, disabled, and elderly people, as well as drug users, vagrants, and those who refuse to consign themselves to labour — are subject to various forms of erasure. Like any potential threat to capitalist hegemony, these outsiders and those on the very periphery of the labour force must be managed, regulated, tracked, policed, contained, “rehabilitated,” “cured,” caged and warehoused — lest they realise their common interest in challenging a society premised on the extraction of labour. Full call at link in bio.

DISRUPTING LINES, DEFINING BALOCHISTAN Hiba Zubairi writes about the spatial politics of Baloch resistance, for the next installment in our special series, Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons. Since 1948, the state of Pakistan has occupied Balochistan in order to extract valuable materials for statecraft. In response to this violent, authoritarian occupation, the indigenous Baloch have organized insurgencies of spatial sabotage and disruption to expose and undermine the colonial state and its global patrons. Up now on our site (link in bio).

We’re hosting a new Coöp Café evening at [woonruimte coöperatief], organized by Wooncoöperatie In Eigen Handen @ineigenhanden 08/04 · 19:30-21:30 Free entry (donation welcome) Wheelchair accessible, gender-neutral toilet available RSVP via link in bio Coop Café: Room to Move, A conversation on housing and creative autonomy What happens to culture when housing becomes unaffordable? And what becomes possible when housing is secure? During this evening, we explore the relationship between housing, collectivity, and cultural production. With contributions by Tayfun Balçik @tayfun.balcik , Marian van Bodegraven @marianvanbodegraven , and Charlie Clemoes @chauncey_clams , each sharing perspectives from Amsterdam, São Paulo, London and Manchester. The evening will conclude with an open discussion with the audience. @timetoaccess @nieuwemeent @cooplinknl @amsterdamalternative @de.bundel @failedarch

In West Papua, connectivity is built through systemic dispossession. The Youtefa Bridge exemplifies this phenomenon, where dispossession is central to the Indonesian government’s settler-colonial approach to infrastructure in West Papua, rather than an unwanted consequence. Siti Amrina Rosada @s.a.rosada and Robbani Amal Romis write about Indonesian infrastructural encroachment in West Papua, and its extensive impacts on indigenous life and resisrance. Read the full article on our website through the link in bio.

New Article | Europe Expands Its Carceral Edge into Albania In the name of humanitarianism, Italy has constructed extraterritorial detention centres on Albanian territory. Framed as sites of care and efficiency, these facilities operate as carceral enclosures, extending European border control beyond EU territory while maintaining full Italian jurisdiction. What emerges is not only a migration policy, but a spatial strategy: architecture, logistics, and law working together to externalise confinement. Read the full piece by Klodiana Millona (@millonaliu ) and Kristina Millona at the link on our bio. This article is a part of our series, “Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.”

Built on the site of a former NATO compound, the Netherland’s most (in)famous asylum seeker centre Ter Apelervenen is caught up in a centuries’ old hinterland dynamic in which infrastructures of war, asylum and confinement remain largely unseen. Read the full piece by Robert Glas (@robert_glas ) and Hanneke Stuit at the link in our bio. This article is part of our series, “Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.”

"Yet what the CCAC's really represent is a deepening of longstanding policies of deterrence, containment and exclusion, now embedded in an even more hardened architecture of control." This episode focuses on Greece’s so-called new generation refugee camps, officially known as Closed Controlled Access Centres or CCACs. These are high-tech compounds located on islands such as Samos and Lesvos used to process, detain, and surveil people on the move. In this episode, you’ll hear from voices across spatial practice, activism, and journalism to unpack how these sites operate as extra legal spaces, contributing to a wider ongoing project of the intense management of migration. This podcast was written by System of Systems, co-founded by Maria McLintock, Danae Io, and Rebecca Glyn-Blanco, and narrated by Maria McLintock. It features the voices of Nishat Awan, Lydia Emmanouilidou, Dimitris Choulis, Neni Panourgia and Petra Molnar. Images and video from Petra Molnar. Sound editing by Cameron Christie. This podcast is part of the FA special series Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons. Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever else you usually get your podcasts.

Jails are perceived as liminal spaces where arrested persons are held temporarily until either meeting bail – which few can afford – or facing trial, which can be delayed for years. The perception of jails as temporary holding spaces conveniently justifies county officials’ arguments for jail construction on toxic sites, the logic being that an arrested person’s exposure on a toxic site will not be significant given its temporary nature. Although the average stay in jail pre-trial is 26 days, there are many people who have been held for multiple years without being sentenced or convicted of a crime. In California, out of nearly 45,000 people held in jails pre-trial, there are at least 1,317 people who have been waiting for more than three years. Over 300 people have been waiting longer than five years. Arrest-hungry policing, bail affordability, and the lax nature of allowable sentencing periods combine to make these jails a particularly dangerous carceral mechanism, forcing a growing population to face elongated exposure periods in jails built on toxic sites. Keep reading Tamara Jamil’s essay on the silent toxic jail boom in the US, up now on our site. Link in bio.

"Gabriella's words here are very precise. Her descriptions of the US-Mexico border render it tangible, fleshy, alive to the elements. And this tells me one thing: the border we know, the border presented to us in the media, is an abstraction. Hearing instead of seeing that border, in Gabriela's description as well as in the sounds and textures that were heard at the start, helps make it clear that the border is very real. It lives, and it requires a vast and great effort to keep it alive." This podcast episode is an unpacking of migration and border management with a focus on the US-Mexico border and European externalisation practices. Written and narrated by journalist, jurist and urbanism specialist Nuria Ribas Costa (@nrc.fm ), it features an in-depth interview with Gabriella Sánchez (@_gesanchez ), a socio-cultural anthropologist and global expert on border control. In this conversation, she explains how borders are fictional constructs that require vast amounts of energy and resources to be manufactured into dangerous spaces; but also how borderlands, and border imaginaries, are not just spaces of violence, but of possibility, too. This episode also includes contributions from migration scholars Ahlam Chemlali (@Ahlam.chemlali ) (Danish Institute for International Studies and Aalborg University in Copenhagen) and Luigi Achilli (@achilliluigi ) (Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute); investigative journalist and Lighthouse Reports Director Klaas van Dijken, and Doctor in Rhethoric and Composition at University of Texas at El Paso José Manuel Flores, whose field recordings of his Border Soundscapes project are also woven into the podcast alongside those by Gabriella Sánchez. This podcast is part of the FA special series Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons. Listen to this episode and subscribe to the FA podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever else you usually get your podcasts.

Thamesmead is a town in south-east London that has long occupied an ambiguous place within the cultural imagination. Whilst perhaps most recently associated with the £1.5 billion regeneration project that is being led by the housing association Peabody, local residents are experimenting with art as a way of envisioning alternative urban futures. "The town continues to vacillate between extremes. For some it is a place afflicted by bleak, overbearing architecture. For others, it is a place brimming with novel possibilities." Read the full piece by Zuhri James (@zuhri.james ) at the link in our bio.

Across Lagos, checkpoints range from tire-lined barricades in working-class neighbourhoods to biometric gates in elite estates, quietly enforcing a system where movement is determined less by law and more by class, connection, and cash. "On every road, a lazy wave halts you at a makeshift barricade, one of dozens scattered across working-class Lagos, where informal architecture stands in for official infrastructure, and informal payments replace policy enforcement." Read the full piece by Ivan Ndoma-Egba (@khantheory ) at the link in our bio. This article is part of our series, “Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.”

Forged by Cold War geopolitics, a thriving ecosystem has begun to flourish within the Korean Demilitarised Zone. Birthed and defined by conflict, a sanctuary has been made possible not by peace, but by the perpetual threat of war. “It is a place where nature’s resilience is the direct result of extended deprivation of peace for the people. It forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth – that in the Anthropocene, nature may thrive in the shadows of human destruction, but at a moral and political cost that we cannot ignore, raising difficult questions about how we relate to the environment and to each other.” Read the full piece by Minjeong Kim (@a_woebegone_caterpillar ) at the link in our bio. This article is part of our series, “Everywhere Walls, Borders, Prisons.”